As illustrated in messages from Mayor Ian Hamilton and Mayor Derek Mahon, it’s a time of year when many of us reflect on the past and look to the future.
From the perspective of a community newspaper newsroom, it’s been an interesting year. We’ve endured the usual grumbles about focus on the negative from some factions, while being chastised for not telling the whole story from others. But, with each and every edition, we do our utmost to present a balanced view.
We have been proud to report on the advances being made towards public safety and are enjoying the most open relationship we’ve had in many years with the RCMP (with the exception of Battleford Rural Detachment, which is still reluctant to co-operate with requests for information).
Those developments point to a strong community guided by skilled and sensible leaders working to make the community better for everyone.
On the personnel front, the core group of dinosaurs — John Cairns, Jayne Foster and I — don’t seem to be going anywhere. Young sports guys are much more mobile however. We ended last year with Brett Smith in the sports chair. Unfortunately his association with us didn’t quite last a year. We were both thrilled and dismayed when he was scouted away from us by the daily Prince Albert Herald.
We now have Craig Beauchemin, originally from Whitehorse, Yukon, on the sports beat. Give him a warm welcome as you see him around the community. We’d really like him to last here a whole year, at least!
It has also been something of a record-setting year as we have seen our kudos versus complaints ratio come out more heavily on the kudos side for perhaps the first time in history.
Life is good. All the best in 2015.
