The great sportswriter Murray Poole once told me readers don’t care how you get the story, they just want the story.

I think it stands to reason readers also don’t particularly care how you wrote the story, either, or why you did it a certain way.

Well, apart from those who delight in finding holes in your story, which is another subject altogether. Reporters, like mayors and sheriff’s and football coaches, are among those people in occupations who learn early on that most people can do their job better than they can, if most people weren’t busy doing something else more important. But anyhow.

You may have noticed the Richmond Hill Bryan County Chamber of Commerce story on page 1 ran exceedingly long. Most newspaper people will tell you that’s bad. Readers, they’ll tell you, don’t have that kind of attention span.

I’d argue most newspaper people don’t either. It is what it is.

And in this case a story that took me some 2-1/2 hours to cover and another two hours to write (give or take), is what it is because I didn’t have time to figure out how to break it down into its component parts -- city, county, schools, taxes, Hyundai -- without driving myself nuts. For one thing, I tend to try and answer questions raised when I write one thing.

Say, the airport announcement by Richmond Hill City Manager Chris Lovell, which drew a gasp from some at the event. We reported on the thing months ago, but I didn’t have time to go back and hunt down when and where and what was reported when.

Ditto for the Hyundai deal, which is the elephant in every room from here to Statesboro to Savannah and back up to Atlanta and beyond these days..

I didn’t have time because I don’t have a news staff to take up some of the slack. I don’t have a news staff to take up some of the slack because newspapers are struggling.

So in addition to less coverage, which got me an email from someone named Charlotte recently noting she was disappointed in the paper because it was too heavy on opinion and church stuff and didn’t include enough of what the community needs to know, we’ve got worse coverage, if that makes sense.

Though I emailed Charlotte back asking her to write a letter to editor — she didn’t — I can’t argue. I can say lack of financial support has led to lack of staff, which leaves remaining news staff — me, mostly, though I have a bit of help on the web and from other editors in our chain and some great freelancers, so don’t let me act like I’m on an island here — with more to do, which leads to less time to do any one particular thing.

As an aside, it was interesting to sit through the Chamber’s event and take notes on all the great economic news going on around here while we’re slowly fading away, but for the most part I don’t blame anybody.

Like the Model T and Blockbuster Video stores, newspapers are dying out. Some of it’s our fault, some of it’s the fault of circumstances beyond our control. And some of it is due to people who don’t care. They can get more attention in a “look at how wonderful I am” Facebook post than through advertising with us.

We do have great advertisers. I’ve mentioned them in this space before. I appreciate them and every subscriber we have but they are thinning out. People don’t read newspapers anymore, or not enough people do to keep us afloat.

I don’t know what will happen. I suspect the Bryan County News at least will be in the hunt for a few more years yet, anyway, while the people paid to figure out how to make this business model profitable once again get it sorted. Maybe.

I do know, however, one definition of insanity is to keep doing the same thing over and over again and expect to get a different result.

So I not only went long in the story I wrote on the Chamber’s State of the Community breakfast spectacular, but I also wrote it more or less chronologically and didn’t do much in the way of research to answer questions raised along the way. That’s also a no-no in journalism terms. Pick out what’s most important to lede with, that’s the real way to do it, and then fill in the holes in your story, etc.

Ah well. I did what I did because I didn’t have time to put the story into any sort of order and because, once I finally finished writing up the thing I didn’t have much time left to finish knocking out page layout, or rewriting the words that go into this space or trying to read my own to make sure I didn’t murder any sentences or get names wrong.

Anyway, at least now you know why that story on page 1 is so long.