The Gazette is growing. We are adding staff and adding content. We always have more content than we can fit in each issue, so we must expand. Expanding the paper takes money and lots of extra layout work. As we can organize the resources, we will grow.

As we grow, we pick up many new advertisers. (I know you have heard this before, but it is critical that you let the advertisers know that you appreciate their support of the neighborhood paper. The wonderful Gazette staff does all of the work, but the advertisers pay for it.) We try to keep our advertising to content ratio fairly constant - when we increase the number of ads, we increase the content. Most US newspapers have twice the ad ratio that we have in the Gazette. If we followed the national average, the Gazette would have twice as many ads, but no more content.

While we have added many new features over the years, all the old ones remain - history articles, columns, puzzles. In the next year we have many exciting (at least to us) features to add. It is intentional that some will appeal to one age group more than to another. For example, the title of this editorial is a reference to a David Bowie song. There are readers too old and others too young to get that. My belief is that if all our readers like every part of every issue, then either we write brilliant, ageless content (yeah, right), or we are only serving one segment of the Village. Our goal for each issue is that every reader will find some articles that are interesting and some that don't interest them much. We know you will read the ones that interest you, and, just maybe, you will "cross-over" to one you thought you wouldn't like and experience something new. I know this is happening because of recent reader feedback.

We welcome your comments and suggestions - good or bad. This feedback makes us better. I hope to see you all at the March 4th party where you can tell us what you really think. Well, not all 6000+ of you - that could cause a bit of a parking situation at 64th and College!