I once fell asleep standing up at my post during an overnight double shift. I’ve picked rocks from farmer’s fields, milked cows, shoveled manure. I’ve doled out cigarettes and lottery tickets as a gas station, scrubbed toilets, operated fork trucks, simultaneously waited on a dozen packed restaurant tables, I even changed fifty or so dirty diapers in a single daycare shift once ... but I’ve never worked so hard at anything as The Evening Sun’s annual Progress Chenango edition. Nor have I even been so proud.

Standard for just about any project we carry out at The Evening Sun, motivations for success are drawn from the reputation left behind in our work more than the paycheck we draw.

Our task during this time is to visit the most prominent businesses and organizations in the area so we can convey their roles in the community to the public.

Though each staff writer approaches Progress with their own style, a standard formula usually requires summarizing their histories, explaining what they exactly do, describe in detail the activities of 2010 and the projections for 2011.

These are no ordinary articles; they are required to be about twice as long and more in-depth. I think my average was around 1,200 words in length though a few special features included in the edition can be twice as long. Though I dodged any such project this year, Melissa Stagnaro’s roundup for the 2010 Commerce Chenango Award winners is one of these lengthy Progress works of wonder. Last year I was charged with writing an article summarizing the drugs issues in Chenango County, which is still to this day my longest, perhaps my deepest, single piece ever contributed to the paper.

But as I’m sure Mel and my other coworkers can attest, it’s not the length of our pieces that makes them good or the prospect of actually writing them that’s the real challenge. It’s that we actually care.

We care because these non-profit organizations, businesses and government agencies are the blood and bones of our entire community. Their successes as a whole are ours as a region. Sometimes the negative tones surrounding our persistent slow economic growth in the area can cast a shadow of over all the hard working people and the opportunities that do exist locally.