Dear Readers,

I got a note from an old newspaper friend this week praising our brand new websites.

He said he liked it because it kept a “sense of place.”

In many ways, this is what our job is all about – keeping a sense of place.

Look out your window. Open the back door. Sit on the porch in the old swing. Enjoy the evening sea breeze while sipping a cold drink. Jump into Linekin Bay. Dunk your toes in the gentle waves at Hendricks Head. Eat a sweet lobster at Robinson’s Wharf. Marvel at the sails dotting the horizon. Wake up to the jab-jabbers from a murder of crows roosting in the big oak tree outside your bedroom window.

A sense of place. It is the key that binds us together. All the rest, including family and friends, is well and good. But it is the sense of place – the wonder of the sea, the majesty of the woods, the strength of the granite ledges, the lupines and beach roses, the grandeur of God’s great geographical masterpiece – that brought us here in the first place and convinced us to stay, some for generations.

When the boss asked me to be the editor of these fine newspapers, I secretly thought: “Don’t foul this one up. This is a special newspaper.”

Since 1876, this newspaper has linked this community together. A century before Facebook and Twitter, it was the Register, and later the Wiscasset Newspaper, which provided a forum for political discourse and chronicled the doings of the boards and commissions that we fashioned to govern ourselves. We told you how much it costs for community services, celebrated our victories and mourned our dead.

Reading files from 100 years ago is like reading today’s edition. There is news of business, of fishing, of local events and concerns. The paper always kept a sense of place.

Many of you have noticed that we have made a few changes. We will be making some more in the near future.

We have added new features, like asking Bob Mitchell to send us his wonderful photographs of our neighborhoods. We asked Tim Sample to tell us a few stories about ourselves and our state. We are trying out a birding column by a couple of Maine bird experts who have strong links to our community. (Tell us if you like it). We are paying a bit more attention to and trying to do a better job of explaining the workings of local government. We are using more and bigger photographs and printing more of them in color. We are trying to write better stories and follow similar styles, always remembering to write for the benefit of the reader and not just to please the subject of the story.

While our website uses the latest technology and is designed to be viewed on your computer along with your i-this and i-that device, we are still chronicling ourselves. You will still see notices of church suppers and community yard sales along with announcements from service clubs, veterans' organizations and, of course, our schools and our precious children.

We will still carry the news of the region, including art openings, family events, musical masterpieces and those that are not so masterful. We will chronicle the comings and goings of folks in great yachts and those rowing small skiffs. We tell you stories of our interesting neighbors who have done things great and small. We will carry tales from our history that you won’t find anywhere else, for many of our friends wonder how others lived in the years before jet planes, interstate highways and supermarkets carrying fresh fruits and vegetables in the winter.

Oh yes, unlike some of our neighboring publications, we will continue to print obituaries. And we won’t charge you a penny for the service. We believe when one of our neighbors dies, it is news and not just another revenue opportunity.

A few months ago, we asked you if you liked the size of our paper. As you can see, it is a larger size than most other papers. We got a lot of response and, frankly, a lot of folks told us they would like it to be a bit smaller and easier to handle. Others said please, please don’t change a thing. Keep it the way it has always been.

The truth is that over the years, The Register has been printed in several different sizes, so there is no “always been” size.

For a lot of folks, the size of The Register and our sister paper the Wiscasset Newspaper is a unique part of our community. While it is a good idea to never say never, for now we plan to keep printing it the same size it has been for the last few years. The larger size, called a broadsheet, has become part of our sense of place.

While have tiptoed into the digital arena by creating a new website, we will use the new technologies to partner with, not to replace, our printed paper. We will use both of them to do just what we have done for the last 136 years, providing the ink that helps keep our neighbors and friends together.

And we will always try to keep our sense of place.

Joe Gelarden