Constructive criticism is important and an amount of disagreement is healthy and livens up what we do.

But sometimes the level of animosity some people have for the paper blows me away, especially on social media.

Over the weekend we published an opinion piece on our website “The new resources boom - is the party already over?”

The piece written by Elizabeth Knight of The Age urged caution on commodity prices and predicted coal and iron would not rise further in 2017 and 2018.

Although I disagree with some of the conclusions the writer made in her piece, it was certainly a thought provoking piece and one worthy of some attention.

Unfortunately some of our readers took exception at us reproducing the piece with comments like “Congratulation to the North West Star. For depressing our community more than it already was”, “Most negative newspaper ever” and “If you listen to anything written by this paper”.

I can understand why people don’t want to hear negative news especially in tough times, but our job as a newspaper is to reflect all reasonable views on the situation, even if we don’t necessarily agree with them.

And I thoroughly reject the comment about the supposed negativity of the North West Star. 

A quick look through some of the big stories of this last week include the recognition of the wonderful work of the SES, the community standing together against suicide, and the superb work of some of our young people educating their peers in short films about sexual health.

And on Saturday I attended the EMO Trans 2016 Northern Outback Business Awards where the overall atmosphere was one of positivity and a determination to bounce back from tough times using modern innovation and good old-fashioned hard work.

These are sentiments the North West Star shares, despite what our knockers think.

We won’t shy away from negative news when it comes our way, but if we have a philosophy at all it is to pump up the great things that are happening in our region.

Long may that continue. DB