Going into last week, you could have stopped almost anyone on the street in the Mudgee CBD and asked them about the rumours floating around ALDI and the Paragon Hotel.
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They would have told you some version of a story that involved the selling of a liquor license and that the newly-refurbished ALDI would reopen with a bottle shop.
Shockingly to some, but annoyingly obvious to others, neither were true. ALDI reopened with a jazzy new space - and no booze, and the Paragon has a new lick of paint with other changes coming - but none of them to do with its hotel license.
One of the challenges we face as the Mudgee Guardian and the media as a whole is the sheer amount of places people get their news these days. To some people, if they didn't see it in their feed on Facebook, then it didn't happen.
Speaking to others, they still rely on the ol' newspaper to keep abreast of the region. My generation largely gets their news from places like Facebook, Reddit, Instagram, their friends and the tv.
Our job is to stay on top of this and deliver the news in as many places as we can while maintaining our standards of quality and accuracy.
Such a rumour likely found its way onto social media at some point, maybe a community page or a group chat where it went unchecked and spread as fact until enough people were saying it that people accepted it as a given.
For some, this rumour probably fed into a narrative they had already constructed in their mind and nothing would convince them otherwise.
Was there a way to inform everybody? Maybe not. But it was still pretty shocking to me when I was outside ALDI on the day it was set to reopen and overheard several people eagerly waiting at the doors, ready to but ALDI's cheap alcohol they had heard was coming.
Some inside baseball here but the two most popular stories we published last week? That's right, the one about the Paragon and the one about ALDI.
Even after we published these, there are still people out there that are sure that something will prove them right.
My favourite stories to cover are ones based on rumours. You never know how a region-wide game of telephone like that can twist what might have been a morsel of truth into the absurd.
