I have always joked the holy trinity of local newspaper stories is dog poo, parking and rubbish.

And while it has always been a tongue-in-cheek remark designed to raise a smile while giving talks to the local WI or Rotary club, I am deadly serious.

There is no doubting our audiences are inevitably interested in the big breaking stories like major crimes, serious car crashes and big crown court trials.

But they are also quite rightly obsessed with the issues that affect their day-to-day quality of life.

We have no hesitation in breaking the big stories online as quickly as we can and our growing digital audiences are a testament to the fact how well we do so.

In our free paper market places, especially when we are taking on paid-for opposition, a digital-first strategy makes perfect sense.

But for our traditional paid-for papers like the 299-year-old Kentish Gazette, we need to take a slightly different, more sophisticated tack.

Because our digital presence means we will break fewer stories in our papers of record, we need more exclusives borne out of journalistic vigour that appear in hard copy and then do incredibly well online, detailed backgrounders on the big stories and intelligent analysis of the issues like those in the holy trinity.

Take this week's paper. It looks at the possible effects of not merging four east Kent district councils in Kent.

That sounds dry but bin collections going from fortnightly to monthly, the demise of the park and ride scheme into the city of Canterbury, less street cleaning and the closure of play parks in the district will get our readers going.

The paper also looks at changes to bin rounds, the banning of parking on pavements, the imposition of more yellow lines, a crackdown on litter louts and vandals and the sell-off of council car parks.

More recently, we have covered the push for a ban on cars in the city for one day every year and the plethora of planning applications for huge numbers of houses.

All of this has seen enormous engagement through our letters pages, under the line on our website and through the comments left on our social media channels.

We have also naturally gravitated towards running more opinion pieces on the big issues from contributors who are in the know and have something to say.

Of course, we still have our own experts in political editor Paul Francis - the scourge of those who inhabit the corridors of power, business editor Chris Price and our sports team.

This strategy means newspapers, our website, our social media channels, our radio stations and our forthcoming foray into terrestrial television all complement each other in serving content in a way that suits each platform.

Finding and then telling the stories our audiences care about will always be the secret to our continued success and will help to build a solid for our commercial teams to sell to.

As ever, if there is an issue that you think we have missed let us know. Email kentishgazette@thekmgroup.co.uk