Occasionally I'll receive feedback on an article written by one of our regular columnists that refers to the writer as an employee of the company.

In most cases, however, those contributors are not employees. They are freelance columnists who have agreed to provide content - much of it opinion-based - to the newspaper. Essentially, they are like any other independent contractor - from an electrician to a motor route carrier - that the newspaper might use to provide a service to our company.

Some of these freelancers are paid a small fee for each published article, but they are by no means making a living with that money. They do it largely because they care about the issues they're addressing, and they enjoy writing.

Other columnists, many of the local experts who contribute columns to the Lake Life sections on topics such as health-care, education, food and local history, contribute unpaid columns because they're getting some exposure for their company or organization by contributing. They also tend to be passionate about their writing subjects.

The Citizen is unique for the shear volume of local freelance contributions published, and it's one of the key reasons the paper is so locally focused.

Take a look at other daily newspapers that cover communities roughly the same size as Auburn and Cayuga County. Few are able to consistently produce editions with local centerpiece stories on every section front, with features sections (if they have a regular features section at all) that have three full pages of local content, with sports sections that nearly every day have themed inside local pages such as Fun & Games, Golf and the Doubledays page.

We're able to make the paper so intensely local thanks in large part to the dedicated employees we have, no doubt.

But we're also very fortunate to be covering a community that is filled with so many people who are interested in contributing content on a freelance basis, and are qualified to do so.

The service they provide our readers takes commitment. It's not easy to produce columns regularly and on a deadline, especially for people who are not journalists or writers. And it's never easy to subject your work to the judgments of editors and, ultimately, the public.

Thanks goodness our coverage area has so many people willing to do this, because it makes for a more thorough product that hopefully can appeal to a large cross-section of the community.

Executive editor Jeremy Boyer's column runs Saturdays in The Citizen and he can be reached at 253-5311 ext. 231 or jeremy.boyer@lee.net