I promise you, dear reader, that I will make you mad.

I also promise I will make you happy, while simultaneously angering many of your neighbors.

Because newspapers reflect the real lives of the communities they serve — with all its diversity of thought and ups and downs — newspapers run good and bad stories and highlight viewpoints from across the spectrum.

Just like your life makes you happy and angry, so, too, should your newspaper.

As a newspaper reader, I encourage you to take the long view, and to stick with the paper even when it’s making you mad, because it will make you happy again.

Take, for example, a series of stories I wrote at the Battle Creek Enquirer.

Albion Public Schools, a majority-Black school district east of Battle Creek, was going broke. Declining enrollment (much of it because of a Schools of Choice exodus), coupled with rising costs and poor decisions by earlier school boards and superintendents, meant the district was out of money and had to develop a plan for solvency to avoid state takeover.

The school board settled, eventually, on closing Albion High School and sending those students to nearby Marshall Public Schools, an overwhelmingly white and far more affluent school district between Albion and Battle Creek.

It’s important to understand that Battle Creek and its surrounding communities have a long, complicated history with race, racism, and racial healing that is really too complex to get into here. But the Albion-Marshall proposal triggered a lot of people’s prejudices and fears based on that complex history.

Many people resented the idea that a majority-Black school district would lose its high school, while a majority-white district would get all those per-pupil dollars from the state as Albion students moved over. Many Black parents in Albion worried about how their children would be treated in Marshall.

I wrote about all of those concerns during the very tough few months of deliberations, negotiations, and school board votes at the two districts. Leaders in both districts accused me of trying to sabotage the proposal, which the Albion superintendent saw as the only chance to save Albion’s elementaries and middle school and preserve some of the identity the schools provided to the city.

After the high school merger was finalized, however, the two districts did things right.

They held summer camps that brought Albion and Marshall kids together to get to know one another. They hired an outside consultant on racial healing to work with the kids and train teachers and others on implicit bias. Marshall even changed its mascot to a new name, chosen by the students, that blended the two schools’ mascots into a new identity. They were no longer the Marshall Redhawks or the Albion Wildcats. They were the Redcats.

They really made it a new school, not just Marshall taking over Albion.

And the white superintendent of Marshall and the Black superintendent of Albion not only worked well together but became good friends, exemplifying a successful partnership to both of their communities.

I got to write all those stories, too, and prove to my sources I was in it for the long haul and not just out for scandal (the Battle Creek Enquirer compiled all my Marshall-Albion stories and several other reports on race in Battle Creek into an e-book, which I think you can still purchase here: tinyurl.com/3hox2uzn).

The point in that story is that newspapers are a long game and ought not be judged on the contents of any one edition.

If you don’t like today’s front page, you might like tomorrow’s. If you dislike the editorial cartoon on today’s Commentary, you’re likely to like tomorrow’s or the one the day after. Disagree with today’s syndicated columnist? Tomorrow, we’ll have one more up your alley.

It’s an even longer game than that. Uncomfortable with the tough wire service stories about this president? Wait until the next president has a scandal, and you’ll get to read about that, too.

Newspapers think in the day. What might be front-page news one day gets pushed inside on another day by a story of even bigger consequence. A meeting we might have covered on any given night gets skipped so the reporter can head someplace else with an even more important development.

But that short-term agility means that, over the long term, our coverage balances out to reflect the bigger picture of the communities we cover. The meeting we skipped before will be the bigger news next go-round. The politician whose misstep we covered one week will get ink for an accomplishment the next.

We will make you mad.

We will make you happy.

That’s life, and that’s what we reflect.