It's been good to talk to some of our readers at our focus group events over the past few weeks and interesting to see how invested people are in the future - and the continued success - of the Abergavenny Chronicle.

Over the past year or so, our website has gone from strength to strength and its reassuring to know that more people than ever are reading the stories we produce - last month we had almost 350,000 page views, which was a record for us.

It's always a challenge to cover the day to day happenings in a small town - what's a breaking news story for some people is often family tragedy in the making for others and we are always very aware of this fact because for those of us who work on The Chronicle, this is our town as well and most of us have lived here all of our lives and been actively involved with the community for most of that time.

Sometimes striking a balance between doing our job and respecting the community is a difficult one. Sometimes we’re called upon to hold a flame to the feet of those in power and sometimes that makes us unpopular, but we will continue to do it, if it’s for the benefit of the town - as I’ve said often before, a local newspaper should be ‘a town talking to itself’ with us eavesdropping on the conversation.

We appreciate that the news isn’t always good and that behind every siren there is a human reality but equally our job as journalists is to cast light on these stories in a way that is as responsible and as accurate as possible so that when you click on our website you can be confident that its content is reliable and trustworthy.

It sometimes feels that it's a no-win situation - if we break the news as it happens we are dubbed irresponsible and callous; if we hold off until we know the whole picture we are dubbed slow off the mark and irrelevant but whatever happens we will always try our very best to ensure we present the news not only as quickly as possible but also in a way which is sympathetic, accurate and trustworthy and we hope our readers will continue to turn to us for the truth behind the sirens and flashing lights.

That does sadly come at a cost and in early October our website, will be adopting a subscription model, which is a fancy way of saying, we'll be asking you to pay for some the stories you want to read.

We know how important the news we provide is to the community and so we will never be asking readers to pay for some of the content we put online - emergency information, public safety issues and essential public information will still be available for you to read freely, but some of our stories will be going 'behind a paywall’.

By putting a charge - less than £1 a week in most cases - on some of these stories we hope will be able to continue providing the quality journalism you have come to expect from the Chronicle, well into the future.