Local, local, local. If I wrote that once in my first year and a half as editor of this news organization, I wrote it a hundred times.

Local. Local. Local. It’s the direction we have gone in this new age of news media. It’s my vision. It’s our mission.

Apparently I wore the mantra out. A year and a half ago, an Independent-Mail vice president was at a Christmas party at which a reader or two suggested that I give the word(s) a rest. So I did.

But a funny thing has happened in recent months. A few readers have wondered why earthquakes in China, a cyclone in Myanmar, floods in Iowa and fires in California have not been front-page news. Why have McCain and Obama and soldiers’ deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan been buried on inside pages?

The clincher: Where was the news about Tim Russert’s death?

The answer: It was in your local newspaper (page 25a).

If you were touched by Russert’s sudden passing, as I was, odds are you tuned into NBC (or MSNBC), as I did. Russert’s networks saturated us with extensive coverage. After two or three days, I had enough, but my wife kept watching and watching and watching. You won’t meet two bigger fans of the “Meet the Press” icon.

So why wasn’t the death of a journalism giant splashed on our front page?

Because it wasn’t local news. Because an editor has to put his personal feelings aside. And because no wire story could have told Russert fans anything that they didn’t already know.

NBC did not report on the race for Anderson County sheriff. MSNBC did not report the news that the Anderson County Council passed a big budget that included a vague call for a full audit of county spending. The national network’s local affiliate did not play host to, much less report on, Anderson County candidate forums.

When’s the last time CNN or Fox News reported news from Iva or Pendleton? We hear complaints that we don’t report enough news from these communities.

Where else will you see who made the honor roll at Concord Elementary School or which band is performing next at Downtown Sounds?

We changed our newspaper’s format a few months ago, but we didn’t change our philosophy. Maybe the fact that we no longer have a local section sent the wrong signal to readers. But where we used to have national and international news toward the front of the “A” section in the previous format, now we have local news up front.

News from around the nation and world still has a place in this paper. Ideally we provide a page for national news and at least a partial page for world news. Sometimes we have room for more. Sometimes it’s less. When the Olympics and political conventions begin, we’ll try to make room for more wire stories.

But our focus won’t change. It was, is and will be local, local, local. Get it? Get it? Get it?

Local.

Local.

Local.