A few weeks ago we wrote in this same space to address public records that would soon to be added to each edition of the LaGrange Daily News.

In today’s edition, we’ve made those changes, with the addition of arrest and incident reports from the Troup County Sheriff’s Office.

We also plan to start publishing incident reports from the LaGrange Police Department, fire calls, restaurant scores, marriages and divorces as well as other public records. Each day those public records will be published on page five — our new dedicated records page — of our newspaper, along with obituaries.

The public records we are publishing are standards of good daily newspapers throughout the publishing industry.

For some time, it has been the policy of the LaGrange Daily News to reserve the right to print the names of individuals charged with felonies.

As such, these names have been printed, while the names of individuals charged with misdemeanors have not.

This policy has been in place in order to bring attention to the more serious charges made in the county.

Moving forward, this policy will change to add the names of adults charged or convicted in misdemeanor offenses.

The addition of public records is a stepsforward in meeting our obligations to our readers and our community. This will be handled in an unbiased, fair and straightforward manner.

Our goal, and that of any good newspaper, is to inform, connect and bring value to the lives of the people in the community.

We’ve also recently changed the design of our front page and have published two magazines — LaGrange Living and our Pigskin Preview — over the last month.

We still have many steps to take to improve our newspaper, but we feel like these were all big ones in producing a product that this community can be proud of.