Your community newspaper and you

Dear Greater La Conner Community,

Welcome to the La Conner Weekly News. If you are getting the paper for the first time, I hope you will find your community newspaper an enjoyable and worthwhile read. Valued subscribers, I hope this issue meets your expectations and needs. Thank you, subscribers, for your ongoing engagement with the community through these pages.

This newspaper exists for the community. That is you. Decades ago, when the local paper was The Puget Sound Mail, every issue said “Covers La Conner and its Rich Agricultural Region” on the top of page 1, above the paper’s name.

The paper’s name has changed but its purpose remains the same. Today’s paper was sent to every home in the La Conner School District. La Conner school activities, starting with students and highlighting their classes, teachers, administrators, staff and the school board, are central to this paper’s reporting. Sports, band and choir and extra-curricular activities are also tracked in normal times when they are everyday happenings.

Shelter Bay, some 1,800 people in about 900 homes, is an important part of the greater La Conner community and their issues are regularly reported, as on page 1 today.

Also found in this paper’s pages are business developments, local governance, area elections and more.

Equally important are reader voices and they appear as the spirit moves you as letters, guest columns, articles, announcements and photographs.

Keeping abreast of the news weekly in your community is more than a good idea. Your local newspaper informs and keeps you up to date on the place and the people most important to you.

That is because the paper is about you and your neighbors.

The Weekly News is also about democracy. The heart of it is you, people engaged with your neighbors and friends.

“Democracy depends on an informed citizenry” reads the promotion in the Woodinville Weekly. The punchline: “Staying informed starts here.” That is true. You put the community in community newspaper. Your paying attention, discussing, criticizing and participating – staying informed – is critical to the health of the community, whether it has to do with a school levy, the town budget, a band concert or a championship basketball team.

All in all, it is quite a deal for $45 a year, the price of a subscription. For less than a dollar a week, the La Conner Weekly News will be mailed to your home. If you find that a good idea, subscribe.

This is an especially good deal now, for in January subscriptions will rise to $60 annually, as the Weekly News faces what will only be the end of the first year of the coronavirus pandemic. The new normal is not yet here, but the Weekly News is determined to report on its birth and be present to cover its emergence. The paper is adapting and preparing.

Subscriptions cover a fraction of total expenses, just about a year’s worth of weekly printing. Readers are the reason for newspapers, but subscribers do not cover costs. It is advertisers who provide the revenue that make delivering the Weekly News to you possible. That burden has to shift, as the start of fixing the broken model of newspaper publishing.

I hope you will join your neighbors reading the Weekly News, for your own good, for the good of your community.

Valued subscribers, I hope you want to renew. This holiday season consider giving the gift of a subscription, a love letter from the town you love to your families and friends who care so much about La Conner.