Dear Readers,

Have you heard of trickle down economics? Well, here at the Boothbay Register/Wiscasset Newspaper, we are experiencing the annual “trickle in” effect.

Our snowbirds, the lucky folks who spend the winter in the southland, are coming back, one by one, trickling into our office to redirect their copy of the paper to their summer residence.

Welcome back, friends. We missed you, although we are sure you didn’t miss our snow. But that is another story for another time.

We have been mailing out both papers to our out of town friends for years. Honest, we do it every Wednesday. Yet, somehow, the U.S. Postal Service seems to have a problem delivering them on time. We have gotten reports of both papers arriving one or two or three weeks late. We also have reports of several copies being delivered on the same day. Yes, they were all delivered late.

Just for the record, this is not a complaint about the local postal workers. We love them. They do a great job.

Every Wednesday, we have dozen or so folks stop by our back door to pick up a copy of the papers when it is hot off the presses. That is the time we also prepare bundles of papers for delivery to our local post offices. The good folks there stuff them in your mail boxes on Thursday. We also deliver them to several retail spots.

The less than faithful service from our out of town friends at the U.S. Postal Service is one key reason we created a new online version of both the Boothbay Register and the Wiscasset Newspaper. These new online versions, www.boothbayregister.com and www.wiscassetnewspaper.com, can be accessed from your home computer, your business computer, your tablet or your smartphone.

The websites feature new stories every day. In important or breaking news events, we post updates several times each day.

For those who really like to be in the know, we have a daily email feature called “The Daily Catch” on the website. Those who visit the website, click on the Daily Catch icon and sign up, will receive the top news stories of the day each morning in their email inbox.

Lots of our readers seem to like this feature.

The website also gives us the ability to add video to our written stories. We are experimenting with this feature, as we, just like you, are learning how to communicate in the digital age. For example, we arranged to tap into the Maine DOT traffic cameras to show you if there is a major traffic jam on the Route 1 bridge over the Sheepscot River in Wiscasset.   

All of this is done to keep up with the times. It gives us another way to deliver the news to you.

We concentrate our efforts on things happening in Boothbay, Boothbay Harbor, Southport, Edgecomb, Wiscasset, Alna, Dresden and Westport Island and parts in between. In case you haven’t noticed, the television news and the major metro daily newspapers rarely carry stories about our little communities.

If you want to know what is happening in our communities and the comings and goings of our friends and our neighbors, we urge you to buy the Boothbay Register or the Wiscasset Newspaper, or visit  www.boothbayregister.com; www.wiscassetnewspaper.com.

Did I mention the website is free?