The newspaper depends on area columnists and news contributors to help fill the pages with words and photos that make it a true community grab each week.

The columnists keep their “people” informed of what’s happening, whether it’s news about neighbors and friends and “local” events or what a group or organization has done, is doing, or plans to do. Each week, the columnists dutifully file their columns to us via email and we try to make room on our pages so our readers can stay informed. Some columnists have been doing so for years and some are new. We wish to salute them here and are looking forward to them continuing in 2020. We would name you all but are afraid we would leave someone out.

Our news contributors – currently Phil DiVece, Jane Carpenter, Jenny Bennett, Kellie Bigos and newcomer Sarah Whitfield – help fill in the gaps in reporting news and writing features that our full-time reporters don’t have time to get to. They are important to us as our reporters are usually busy covering town and school board meetings, sports teams, covering events and more. The news contributors also cover meetings, sports and events and write features but mostly to a lesser degree. We thank the communities for trusting our contributors and allowing them to gather the news. We also thank our most recent news contributors, Art Mayers, who goes south between October and March, Margaret Hoffman (when she is able to do so between her full-time job), Craig Lancaster (ditto) and summer contributor Page Brown.

Happy New Year to them and our readers.