It was roughly one year ago that the first edition of The Lenawee Voice rolled off the presses at the Tecumseh Herald. It’s been quite a year, and on the occasion of our first anniversary, we want to take a moment to reflect on the goals we set one year ago — and to thank everyone who has made this project possible!

When we launched this newspaper, we bet on the idea that we could make a difference in our community by making reliable, high-quality local news freely available to as many people as possible. In a fragmented media ecosystem where the news we see is too often dictated by what gets surfaced by our social media feeds, we felt that there was real value in the seemingly old-fashioned medium of the printed newspaper. And we felt that the best way to achieve our goals as quickly as possible was to put that newspaper into people’s mailboxes every single month — for free.

It was a big gamble. But so far, we’re pleased to say that it seems to be working.

One year ago, we laid out the following core goals: promoting civic engagement and volunteerism; increasing citizen involvement in government; strengthening local businesses and institutions; and helping people feel more connected to their community. Over the past 12 issues, we have tried to fulfill all of those goals through highlighting news about upcoming local government decisions, publicizing local businesses, promoting the activities of service clubs and other organizations that are doing good work in our community, and writing features about interesting people doing interesting things. 

One thing we’re particularly proud of is that, over the past year, we have publicized the launches of 35 new businesses in Lenawee County and celebrated milestone anniversaries or other achievements for 27 more. Nearly all of these businesses are locally owned — and we’re not afraid to show a little favoritism toward the businesses that originate in our community, reflect our neighbors’ hopes and dreams, and make up the backbone of our local economy.

This paper has grown a lot over the past year, from 20 pages in our first issue to an average of 40 pages per issue today. What we’re able to offer our community has been gradually growing as well. 

We don’t do a lot of breaking news coverage ourselves, but a new partnership with Local Buzz Radio, operated by Doug Spade and Mike Clement, allows us to take the news that they break online and publish it in print, making the newspaper a more complete digest of what happened in our community over the past month.

Over the past few months we’ve also started publishing more news in Spanish as well as English, and beginning with our December issue — in partnership with Lizbeth Perez-Cazares, who many of our readers may know from her role as bilingual library assistant at the Adrian District Library — we have expanded that effort into a dedicated section of Spanish-language news. Part of our mission is to make local news as widely accessible as possible, and we feel that this new Spanish-language section is an important step in realizing that goal.

We also have a lot more to do! Although we’ve published a lot of stories in the past 12 months, the stories we have covered are still outnumbered by the interesting, important and newsworthy stories that we haven’t. 

In the months to come, we hope to do more to reflect the great work that’s happening in our local schools. We hope to improve our coverage of local elections. And we hope to turn this Perspectives page into a truly useful local forum where residents can discuss ideas for making Lenawee County a better place to live.

We would be remiss if we didn’t thank the more than 100 businesses and organizations that have advertised in these pages over the past year. Their support is what allows us to keep this newspaper free. We are humbled by the trust they have placed in us — and we hope you will support them!

Finally, we want to thank you. Thank you for reading. Thank you for going on this journey with us. 

And, as we embark on our second full year of publication — stay tuned!