Our Tenth Anniversary

This fall AboutTown officially celebrates its tenth anniversary as a community guide in the Rhinebeck - Red Hook - Hudson area. Co-founders and co-publishers Gail Jaffe-Bennek and Paul De Angelis still run the paper. In our first, twelve-page issue that came out in September, 1997, we wrote that, "whatever the virtues of the global village, the real joys of life are always found close-at-hand," and talked about the paper as "a vehicle to help cement community consciousness." Ten years later, in issues that typically run thirty-six to forty pages, our focus remains doggedly local, while emphatically not provincial. Over the years, such writers as Cynthia Owen Philip, Bernard Greenwald, Clare O'Neill Carr, Esther Kiviat, and Daniel Middleton have developed a devoted readership with their perceptive commentaries on interesting and important aspects of the community. Nationally-known artists and cartoonists, from Liza Donnelly and Michael Maslin to Elwood Smith and Daniel Baxter, enliven our pages with witty drawings and imaginative illustrations. Website visitors have doubled in the last year.

2007–08 promises to be a year of unprecedented new developments at our publication. A major re-design of the paper is slated for this winter, with a complete overhaul of the website planned for completion by next summer (this new site will be fully searchable, interactive and will include a full archive of past issues). Early next year AboutTown will issue its first book, a compendium including some of the best articles by our writers over the past ten years. And slated for Summer of 2008 is a Tenth Year Anniversary Issue that will review major changes in the area over the past decade.