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

The County Gazette 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:

Would you consider linking URLs to other sites e.g. Somerset police, MPH, Taunton station arrivals and departures, etc?  This could bring more people through your site. I also believe videos should be limited to critical events.

We do link to external websites whenever possible, but if we linked to the police or Musgrove Park Hospital too often, for example, we might get penalised by Google for repetition, and therefore not appear as high up in search results.

Video is a crucial part of our publishing strategy now, we use it as often as we can as we have found that readers really engage with it.

Of course, we do have some commercial video content on our articles, but this helps pay for the wages of our reporters, who are the ones who cover the news!

Why are so any of the stories on the website just reprinting various organisations' press releases with no critical analysis or even contextual comments from your journalists?

I firmly believe that, as a local media outlet, we should be completely neutral, and just provide the facts to readers, enabling them to make up their mind on a story.

Therefore, I do not want my reporters to be providing a view or comments on stories, and we use press releases as the basis for lots of our stories, but by no means all of them.

There are plenty that do not make the cut, and all of them are checked over and rewritten before they are used.

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.