BerksMontNews.com provides reader context

BerksMontNews.com continues to bring you context in the stories that most impact your community.

Take this week’s story by Southern Berks News editor Heather Tassmer on the testing of a new emergency communications system at Antietam School District.

Just weeks ago on Jan. 9, Antietam made headlines when a 13-year-old at the school’s middle-senior high school allegedly attacked four fellow students with a knife.

Above from our story, see a photo of Exeter Township School District superintendent Beverly Martin explaining the operations of a similar system at her school district.

For more, pick up your copy of The Southern Berks News this week.

BerksMont website again breaking news

Just a day before The Boyertown Area Times goes to press, BerksMontNews.com is again breaking a key story ahead of our paper edition and again our on line news service gives you a peek at it first.

This time it is Boyertown editor Matthew Reichl who brings you a preview of a story that broke earlier today as shots were reported fired in an Oley development.

Read more of the story here or click on the “Breaking News” bar at our main website BerksMontNews.com.

Keep checking back daily for updates and other breaking stories and watch this blog for upcoming features coming soon to BerksMontNews.com.

The newsroom blues

Stories in last week’s editions of the Berks-Mont Newspapers certainly ran the gamut.

From follow-ups on an alleged knife attack by a 13-year-old on four fellow students at Antietam Middle-Senior High School to the death of a West Lawn woman in the surf south of San Francisco to parents who became concerned about an overdue Oley school bus.

Sure the news is sometimes bad. But there were some bright spots too.

Take the uplifting story of a man traveling across the country in his covered wagon making a stop at Zern’s Farmer’s Market or the story of a Quakertown VFW that has decided to go smoke free.

Here at Berks-Mont Newspapers we are committed to being the primary source of news and information for all the communities we serve whether that news and information be good or bad.

Updates on our website now make it possible to bring you breaking news faster than ever before and our weekly newspapers bring you a wrap up and analysis of those stories just as they have faithfully for many years.

No matter what the story, we’ll tell you how it affects you and your community. So stay tuned…

News comes daily from BerksMontNews.com

There was a time when a weekly paper was limited to covering local news only once a week but no longer.

With stories like a recent decision by the Berks County DA not to seek the death penalty in the deadly beating of Kyle Quinn, 19, of Warminster in Kutztown, our website can now help us inform readers 24 hours a day.

In a first draft of her story, The Kutztown Area Patriot editor Lisa Mitchell reports:

Berks County district attorneys will not seek the death penalty against the
three Allentown men charged with the murder of Kutztown University student Kyle Quinn, 19, of Warminster.
"We do not believe the case was eligible," Assistant District Attorney Jonathan Kurland told the Patriot on Jan. 25.
For a case to seek the death penalty, Kurland explained that there needs to be one
or more aggravating circumstances present.

For more details read this week’s edition of The Kutztown Area Patriot. E-mail Lisa Mitchell at lmitchell@berksmontnews.com.

Welcome to the BerksMont Times

So what is a newspaper blog and what can readers expect from it regularly?

Well, that is one of the questions we will be trying to answer in the coming weeks with the launch of the BerksMont Times.

In this blog, we hope to provide a bit more prospective on what’s coming up in our newspapers and on our website and why we think it is important.

We’ll try to explain:
· Some of the changes that are in store for our papers and why they are taking place
· Why we have chosen some of the stories we have and why we think they will benefit readers
· How readers can have input in our newspapers and on our website in the present and in the future
· And a little bit more about who we are, the BerksMont Newspapers editorial staff, the hard working folks who bring you the news vital to your community each week

Of course, we’ll also try to have a little fun along the way and create a forum for readers to interact with the newspapers, the website and our staff.

Hope you will check back daily with the BerksMont Times or bookmark this site on your computer to find out more about what’s going on and how you can become involved.