Welcome back to our volunteer staff and readers. We hope that you all had an agreeable summer. We look forward to another year of serving you, and we thank you and our advertisers for your continued patronage. We are a non-profit, volunteer community paper and publish every two months, except over the summer. Our policy is to publish news and views of the community. We are a small paper (circulation is 5,300) and depend on you in the community and in community organizations to submit stories, photos etc. which may be of interest to our readers.
As a community newspaper, we live and die by the number of volunteers and advertisers. Many of our volunteers work long hours, which takes them away from other opportunities to work and feed their families. We would like to recompense one or two of them who are going through difficult financial times right now, as we can't afford to lose their expertise. We would like to know what you, volunteers and members of the community at large, think of this idea. Most community papers are either run by commercial enterprises (a la The News from Hunt Club-Riverside, or the paper for Greenboro, Alta Vista's paper etc.) or have some paid staffers (such as NEWSWEST). Most pay a small commission to their advertising staff to boost ad revenues. As the cost of printing has risen dramatically in recent years, this may be a necessity. What do you think? Is this the slippery slope to commercialization, or is this recognizing a difficult reality? Let us know your opinion. It matters.
A special good-bye and thank you to Rita Desjardins, who is leaving our community. Rita, former Separate School Trustee and head of the Carlington Save Our Streets Committee, graced our community with her tenacious courage in taking on bureaucrats and politicians alike, acting as a volunteer watchdog, community advocate and active member of the Executive of the Carlington Community Association. We'll miss her.
We are looking for volunteers to help us continue to produce this World Wide Web site on the Internet for the Summit. Knowledge of HTML would be nice. We would like to use this site to publish news items and special event notices for the periods between issues of the paper-version of the Summit (e.g. every second month). As our community becomes more wired (er... electronically speaking), we expect this site to grow and prosper. E-mail us at stepmclo@achilles.net if you are interested.
We are also always happy to hear from volunteer writers, photographers, editors, graphic artists, sales reps, delivery people etc. You don't need experience, just a desire to help. This is your paper. Call us at 729-7487.
Finally, we have a fax machine. Miraculously, even before we were able to advertise that fact, we have received dozens of faxes. Send your faxes to 761-1896, although we still prefer you to drop off stories on disk (WordPerfect 5.1 or MS Word 6.0) at 82 Anna Ave., or attach them to an e-mail, to save re-typing them.