We recently gave our valued subscribers the chance to submit their questions to me - editor of the Bridgwater Mercury, Tim Lethaby.

The Mercury is evolving - being the editor used to just mean deciding what we would tell readers in print, but now journalism can and should be a two-way conversation.

We want you to be involved before, during and after everything we do.

My job is also now a truly multimedia role - we can communicate with you across all our channels: print, website, social and video.

All this allows you to get even closer to the stories - and means we can update you around the clock.

Here are some of the questions we received from our subscribers, with my replies below:

Do your journalists get out and about to report on stories or are they stuck behind desks?

This is certainly something I am encouraging my team to do more of.

We do have a small team with an incredibly large workload, but as often as they can, they get out to interview people, review places and covering breaking news.

How do you balance publishing local stories against more national/general stories?

We want all of our stories to be local, as that is what sets us apart from the national newspapers and websites.

We are being read by more people than ever before, thanks to the online as well as print readership, and it is our unique, local articles that are attracting the most readers.

We do cover national stories if they have a local angle, and our central team produce general articles that are of interest to everyone, but these are all on top of the local news we produce, not instead of it.

Do you try to be ‘neutral’, or do/will you, as a local paper, help fight for local issues?

I firmly believe that, as a local media outlet, we should be neutral on all things - we provide the readers with the facts for them to make up their minds.

However, we will highlight local causes and issues, to give them publicity and to get a response from who or what they are campaigning about.

Could you encourage more educated posts in the comments section which offer more insight?

This is definitely something I am working on, but it is difficult to keep on top of.

I wish all comments were insightful, helpful and calm, but sadly so many of them descend into personal attacks and name-calling.

We do monitor and moderate comments as much as we can, and to stop anonymous attacks, we now require email verification for someone to comment on our site.