You can tell a lot about a town&8217;s personality by the way it treats its strangers.

In small town Mississippi identifying a &8220;foreigner&8221; doesn&8217;t take a masters degree. And in south Mississippi and Louisiana, people from north of Jackson are Yankees, and people from Tennessee might as well be Canadian.

I&8217;m from a college town where the population consists of two types &8212; the permanent residents and the weekenders &8212; and the only strangers are the ones in maroon.

But in Natchez, strangers are our business.

Without the out-of-towners our biggest industry wouldn&8217;t exist and Natchez would hardly be on the map. It&8217;s been that way for years, and it isn&8217;t stopping anytime soon.

Each and every Natchez resident is a professional in the stranger business.

The fact that we treat our strangers well is a comforting fact to a Natchez newbie just moving into town. In fact, I&8217;ve made it part of my recruitment speech to potential newspaper employees.

To a young reporter, coming to a town where coaches call you, police chiefs talk openly and the passers-by learn your name is next to heaven.

There&8217;s no edging into tight circles, getting snubbed by the locals or paying your dues.

You are just in.

If you haven&8217;t yet, you&8217;ll be seeing lots of new faces with reporter&8217;s notebooks in tow in the coming weeks. We&8217;ve hired five new reporters and editors in the last two months.

With the new faces will come questions you&8217;ve answered a hundred times over, but bear with them, they&8217;ll learn soon.

We&8217;ll probably misspell some uniquely Natchez names &8212; apologies in advance. Tell us when we are wrong.

And new reporters never have all the background on your issues that they should. If you&8217;ve got the time, give them the full story.

For those of you in Louisiana, you shouldn&8217;t have trouble spotting your new guy &8212; he&8217;s nearly 7-feet tall. John Gunn (yes, he played basketball at Ole Miss) is now covering Concordia Parish and all its parts.

In Natchez and Adams County, Alabama native Katie Stallcup will be making the rounds.

Rick Breland, the new sports reporter, spent two years of his childhood in Natchez, but probably still needs directions to some of the schools. Rick will also focus much of his time on covering the outdoor events in the Miss-Lou including hunting and fishing.

Next week a new sports editor will start, replacing

Adam Daigle

who recently took a job at a larger newspaper in Tulsa, Okla.

And we&8217;ll have one more new face in the newsroom helping us design the front page and doing some feature writing. She&8217;ll start next week too.

I know, it&8217;s a lot for me to keep up with too. I&8217;m considering nametags.

We aren&8217;t all new though,

Ben Hillyer

and

Joan Gandy

bring more years of experience than I can count to our newspaper.

And lucky for all, our new employees have come to the right place. Natchez never met a stranger.

If you see someone carrying a reporter&8217;s notebook wandering around looking lost, introduce yourself, ask for a business card and point in the right direction.

In this town they won&8217;t be lost for long.

Julie Finley

is the managing editor of The Natchez Democrat. She can be reached at 601-445-3551 or

julie.finley@natchezdemocrat.com