Yesterday I went along to Wilsden Village Hall at the invitation of the Thursday afternoon group who meet there. I admit to being a bit daunted when I walked in and saw the assembly (much larger than I expected). But then I had to ask myself, why be worried?

I’ve never really considered myself a good public speaker. Too many flat Lancastrian vowels, too many umms and errrs, slight panic that I’m not being heard well enough which means I suddenly start booming halfway through a sentence.

But I was made to feel very welcome, and while there were a couple of awkward questions and mild complaints (if the lady who raised the point about spelling mistakes is reading now, we don’t really flog our reporters for such crimes. We wouldn’t get away with that these days. We just lock them in a cupboard for a couple of hours), they were valid ones, and I hoped I answered to people’s satisfaction.

More than that, though, it was good to get out and meet some of you dear people in Readerland. It helps to reaffirm the whole point of this job – that there are many thousands of people out there across the Bradford district who appreciate what we do when we put together a newspaper every day.

It also gave me some food for thought about the ways we deliver our news to people – not in terms of physically shoving the papers through doors, of course, but in the way that newspapers have changed recently to keep up with the times.

I’m talking, of course, about the internet. The T&A has a lively, constantly updated website and this has become an integral part of the way we get news out to our readers.

It was quite telling, though, that not one of the people present yesterday looked at the T&A’s website. These folk were of a certain age, as the saying goes, dyed-in-the-wool, dedicated newspaper readers. They wanted to pick up a physical product and read about the news in their areas, laid out in front of them on pages made of paper.

The internet is here to stay, of course, and newspapers must and should embrace it as a means of reaching our readers.

But yesterday made me realise just how much the newspaper itself is valued by a huge proportion of our readers.

Some newspapers have already gone out of business, some magazines have gone internet-only and abandoned their physical product. Every other week some web guru or other bangs on about how newspapers and even books will be obsolete in anything from five to fifteen years.

The good people at Wilsden Village Hall not only made me feel proud to be a part of the T&A’s role in community life, they gave me hope that there’s plenty of life in newspapers yet.

I just hope they can persuade their grandchildren.