In some ways, nothing is more important than the weather.

The weather dictates how we live, where we live, what we buy, what we use, what will probably be plentiful, and what might become scarce.

In Ada, we got a refresher course on this important truism when, in the predawn hours Tuesday, March 4, 2025, a tornado blasted through town. The tornado was rated as an EF-1 on the Enhanced Fujita scale, indicating 86-110 mph wind gusts, and mild to moderate damage.

We journalists shift into overdrive when the weather gets crazy, and Tuesday was no different.

As I said on social media later that day, “Journalism is making your way around town before dawn in driving rain, using your headlights or flashlights to try to light your subject, making images at ISO 12,800, making some video at the same time, listening to four scanners at once to try to decide where to go next, and thinking about how you are going to write it.”

One reason good journalists do this is that we understand that news sources, mostly newspapers, are the first draft of history.

And although you might dispute it today, next week, or next year, newspapers hold a history in their pages that other sources don’t.

Disagree? Take Thursday’s Ada News and today’s Ada News and put them in a folder or a file cabinet. Ten years from now, pull out your phone and scroll back through literally millions of social media posts and try to find photos and stories about this week’s tornadoes. You probably won’t have much luck.

Then pull out those newspapers. You will hold history in your hands.