The year that just passed, as far as this paper is concerned, was another year of your valuable and loyal patronage. Such is the lifeblood of this paper, and that is recalled and remembered, as you first come to mind every anniversary month. This time it is its 30th.
It was in 1996 when this paper first saw the light of day. So every time the new year is ushered in, and as the past year is looked back to, an assessment is undertaken.
Nevertheless, at its 30th, with your continued support, this paper faces the prospects of 2025 with hope, inspiration and renewed vigor. So we take your supportive hand as we cross the river of another year.
Every struggle it went thru resulted in open wounds to suffer and learn from and eventually scars or permanent marks of the lessons obtained. But if it was able to take and weather thru all of that the past thirty years, being older now, it is in, a better or wiser position to face the future. Yet there is no illusion that it will not stumble and fall every now and then as it wades thru the journalistic, socioeconomic, and political waters. And when it does, it will be groping for your supportive hand, or hankering for your warm and inspiring words, or even cry out for your much needed push for it to reach higher or safer ground.
For though it has acquired a life of its own, like any other entity or institution, it cannot exist in a vacuum. It needs the community, it needs you, as much as it needs the people running it. All of us must cooperate to make it live and grow up into the kind of entity we want it to become. It is not just dependent on one group, not even to the group that runs it. For it is the community’s pulse that makes it tick, the customer’s patronage that constitutes its lifeblood, and the sensitivity to such by its operators that will ensure its sustained growth. Otherwise, it will become irrelevant and die a natural death.
Thus the responsibility for the health or growth of this paper does not just fall on the shoulders of the publisher, nor on its editors or staff. For this is not just mine or anybody’s. It is yours, mine and ours.**