La Conner Weekly News - Your independent hometown award-winning newspaper

Dear valued longtime readers and new subscribers: Thank you for wanting to have the La Conner Weekly News come to your home. Thank you for supporting this newspaper, your community newspaper. Subscribers, new and old, thank you.

The last two weeks have been quite a surprise and even a bit amazing at the newspaper office. The Saturday after the paper provided envelopes, 20 subscriptions were in the paper’s mailbox. The next Tuesday the combined total was 50.

New subscriptions, and renewals, keep arriving in response to the paper’s three-week outreach campaign. Daily, folks have come into the office, envelope or checkbook in hand. Some of you have signed up for two or three years. One has made a six year commitment.

A few of you have sent notes of support. Yes, I agree: we are lucky to have Bill Reynolds chronicling our community.

Last year the Weekly News had some 700 subscribers. It will enter 2019 with over 850, maybe close to 900, at least a 20 percent increase. That is a lot of people in greater La Conner paying attention to their corner of the world.

More than once I have thought this paper is the smallest possible for-profit-as-a-business newspaper. Any fewer readers or income and it would be a “boat,” a hobby.

I am very proud that the greater La Conner community has responded in droves to the offer to get the News weekly in their mailbox by subscribing. That is a vote of confidence for the worth and value and usefulness of the paper.

This is the type of place I want to work and live, engaging my neighbors, paying attention and sharing the news of car accidents, state volleyball championships and town councils and school boards making hard choices to both adequately and properly fund the community’s future.

And every week there are interesting, beautiful and fun photographs in the paper, reminding us why we live here.

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Some have stopped reading the Weekly News. A few have said they have a different political view. Great! – to the latter. Darn to the former, that some in the community have given up on tracking the news and, also, the analysis and opinion of the editor. This paper has time and again advocated participation and asked readers to engage with each other and the editor. It has never asked anyone to agree with its point of view.

By definition, the community is diverse. People that pull away and pull out reduce our cohesiveness.

We cannot be “we the people” if some isolate themselves in frustration, hurt or righteousness.

The Weekly News is not asking for agreement. Challenge it, and its readers, with the best of your beliefs and hopes.

The paper’s pages are always open to readers offering their views.

I own it, but it is your newspaper.