You don’t know how lucky you are.

You have a local six-days-a-week newspaper. You can read it online if you don’t want to buy it in print, and vice versa.

You have a local newsroom too, and you can see the names of the reporters at the top of their stories. Questions? Issues? You can email, call or even stop by.

Better yet, you yourself can write a Letter to the Editor, and there is a good chance it will be printed. Why bother with a local paper, especially with the price of groceries going up? It’s to get answers to the questions that nag you, of course. It’s good to know if your elected officials raised your taxes before those taxes come due, if your school board members want to make cuts before they actually take a vote, why you heard so many sirens yesterday afternoon and more.

Fortunately, you don’t have to guess about these things or try to figure out the truth from social media posts. The Express tells you.

Your local newsroom is a hotbed of facts.

It’s also full of good stories about your neighbors and your community. You might see a photo of your child’s class, your aunt, your dad. The paper can inform you of births, deaths, weddings, school honors and military service. It is your local paper of record.

And, bonus — The Express still gets photos and articles from The Associated Press, the gold standard in state, national and world news coverage.

A Lock Haven business owner I talked with recently lamented that he hadn’t seen anything in the media about the President’s “De Minimus” executive order. The move could shake Chinese businesses’ hold on specific markets. (Think Temu.) I went home, opened that day’s paper and discovered I could read all about it in The Express.

I can’t stress enough how lucky you are…

I now spend part of my time in St. Mary’s County, Maryland, and subscribe to a local paper there, as well as two papers here. I saw right away that this paper knew how to serve its readers. The editors made good choices about what belonged on the front page, reporters knew how to write without using jargon and I felt informed. Sadly, that paper is no more. It has been rolled into a new, weekly publication that covers three counties. It is less than it was.

The most recent issue brought more shrinking. The paper’s pages are now smaller and everything is in one large section, making it seem, in the publishers’ opinion, like a “magazine.” This monster is hard to hold in your hands and hard to read. I now have to peel it like an onion. Still, I will try to stick with this paper, because St. Mary’s needs its local news sources and I need to know what the community’s doing.

Maybe today you are fuming over an editorial cartoon or something else you saw in this paper. Don’t cancel your subscription and walk away. By diminishing the paper, you diminish your chance to give your opinion in a trusted news forum. Instead, speak up! Your voice counts!

We’ve all noticed a media flurry about democracy lately, what it is and how it can be weakened or strengthened. We agree that this democracy thing is a good idea. What stands between this good idea and greed? You know the answer: free speech and a free press and your local paper.

You’ve heard that sunlight can dry up lies and reveal truths. Think of the sunshine, fresh air and oxygen turned on an issue when an informed public discusses the facts reported in the free press. This light can grow the best things in our human nature and burn off the worst.

All papers can be powerful defenders of democracy. Protect and grow the things you feel strongly about. Support your local newspaper.

Wendy Doherty is a retired community editor for The Express.