Dear readers,

Like many of you, I am planning to take the next couple of weeks off to spend time with my family. This has been a good year for Decaturish and a busy one, too. Thanks to financial support from nearly 700 of our regular readers and the generosity of our numerous clients in the business community, I’ve been able to do more with this site. There’ve been more investigations, more news about local meetings and more important stories about our community.

More financial support from readers and the business community means more journalism and that’s good for all of us.

We have had 2.4 million page views this year and we have published more than 1,000 articles. It was the first full year with our new site design, and I think the reorganization of our content has helped us reach more readers who might’ve missed some of the things we’ve published due to the sheer volume of the articles we produce.

I have big plans for 2020 and 2020 has big plans for us. There’s an election coming up, and I’m not just talking about the presidential election. There will be numerous important local races on the ballot and we’re going to do our best to cover as many as we can as thoroughly as we can. There will be more things in store for our paying subscribers, including a live theatrical show at a local venue. I hope to give you more details on that soon.

For those of you who have asked, one of my goals for the upcoming year is to revive the Decaturish Podcast. I had to stop doing that for personal health reasons, but I’d like to bring it back. I will keep you posted on how that develops.

I will also be relaunching our paid internship to include a more rigorous application process for candidates. I will share more details on that one in the next couple of months.

So with 2020 in mind, I’m going to use the next two weeks to reflect, tackle some personal projects — cleaning the house, practicing piano , completing “Link’s Awakening” on the Nintendo Switch, watching Alabama beat Michigan — and take a deep breath before launching into 2020. Our goal is to get to 2,500 paying subscribers by the end of 2021. With that kind of support, I could hire a full-time reporter or two and create something that will serve our community for years to come. If you enjoy what we do, take a moment to subscribe by clicking here. In addition to getting access to subscriber events, you will be on our distribution list for sneak previews of our biggest scoops and stories.

The site won’t be totally dead over the next two weeks. I will post a roundup of the year’s biggest news at some point. But if the site is busy, that means something bad has happened, so let’s hope it stays quiet so we can enjoy this time with our loved ones and our pet projects.

Take care and, barring any unfortunate turn of events, I’ll see you next decade. (Dad joke, couldn’t help myself.)

Have a great holiday,

Dano

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