ONE easy criticism often levelled at newspapers such as ours is that we're only interested in bad news. Utter nonsense.

Look through the pages of the Chronicle and you'll see 'good' news stories outweigh 'bad' ones by some margin.

Every week, we feature joyous stories about readers' charity endeavours or their good deeds helping others.

Plus we also stage the annual flagship Proud of Barnsley awards which shine the brightest of lights on our town’s unsung heroes.

It’s long been a newspaper industry adage that faces sell papers - hence why we have always carried cheque presentations featuring crowds of people smiling for the camera, for example.

The idea being that everyone appearing in the picture might go out and buy a copy to keep for posterity. But it was also widely accepted that bad news had the potential to shift papers just as readily.

If there was something as unfortunate as a house fire or a murder on a street, neighbours wanted to know about it. They might not admit to it, of course…

The emergence of websites has reaffirmed this beyond any doubt.

A glance at the 'most read' section of stories on our site shows that people are more interested in what many people would regard as 'bad' news - court cases, road accidents, crime.

We don't make these statistics up.

But our real objective is to try to reflect life in our town. That means we have to report the good, the bad and occasionally, the downright ugly…