Our Tenth Anniversary

A little over ten years ago the two of us decided to join forces to put out a quarterly community guide to the area we lived in. Last month we celebrated the occasion of AboutTown's anniversary with a party at the Chocolate Factory. We want to thank all who shared the evening or sent congratulations. It was a delight to put faces to the names of so many friends with whom we built phone and e-mail relationships over the years. It also gave us an opportunity to celebrate the local businesses who have stayed with us as loyal advertisers for every issue since that first year.

A tenth anniversary sounded like a good time to update and modernize the look of the paper, so we asked our multitalented designer, Fiona Lawrence, to undertake the assignment. The new, cleaner design she came up with introduces several new features: a full contents page, a regular place for this publishers' note, and new, more readable typefaces. To make the paper easier to navigate, listings have been moved to immediately follow the articles in each section and the calendar has moved from the middle to the back of the paper. We hope these changes will make it easier for our readers to use their reliable community guide in the sometimes ill-lit locations they may find themselves.

Other new developments are also afoot in our tenth anniversary year. Soon we hope to publish a book of some of the best articles we have published. And by summer we plan to offer a totally revamped, much more interactive website (whose use has already increased dramatically over the past year). This should give us the opportunity to offer an ongoing, online "Letters to the Editor" section which our quarterly schedule of publication doesn't otherwise allow. In the meantime, please feel free to be in touch with us at our general e-mail address, info@abouttown.us.

Since we began publication, several other local publications have come and gone; PANDA public-access television has gone through several ups and downs, and appears poised for a new revival; population has outpaced the rest of the state's growth rate at least five-fold. Still, the towns in the AboutTown area retain a good deal of Thornton Wilder's Our Town sensibility, as Lynn Behrendt points out in her commentary on the recent wave of burglaries in Red Hook. For the anniversary we asked Cara DeVito to make a short documentary featuring a number of the many wonderful contributors to AboutTown (available streaming on the home page of abouttown.us). As Mary Anne McLean pointed out so eloquently in that video, "the health of a nation depends on the health of all the little villages and hamlets that make up the nation." We're proud to do what we can to further our local, and thus ultimately our national, wellbeing.

— Paul De Angelis & Gail Jaffe-Bennek, Publishers