Every now and then you get to have a new beginning. For your family it might be a new house, new job or new baby. Maybe even a new grandbaby. 

For my team, it’s our new website. We’re proud to unveil the new digital home of The Citizen—a refreshed look and improved experience designed to keep you connected to the heartbeat of our community. This relaunch was made possible through the creative vision and technical expertise of Jason Hunter Design (JHD), led by Jason Bass. We’re especially grateful to Jason Bass, part-owner of The Pulse, our parent company, whose leadership helped bring this new chapter of The Citizen to life.

I don’t say enough about how amazing Jason Bass is. Every week I curate articles from the hundreds and hundreds of press releases we are sent. Additionally, we create original stories and load in content from our many columnists, too. The energy and technical prowess that gets them all online is Jason. He puts his true heart and soul into The Citizen, making a better publication for all of you. 

And because Jason runs my analytics, I know that there are more and more of you reading our publication each month. Since we started, we have increased our readership by 2.5 times what we started with. That’s over 146,000 of you checking in just in March. (We started with 57,000 on our first month of November.)

Some of you love to hate it—from despising the releases we run about equally from elected officials of both political parties to disagreeing with our take on local government. Others of you are really appreciating local coverage on things like the CSX train derailment. You like that we’re covering the major crime stories locally, too. 

Some of you might have noticed that I’ve begun running the occasional national or state story that has local impact, like when they proposed dropping the state income tax on military benefits. I know a lot of you work in the airline industry and might be retired from the armed services—you deserve to know about legislation that impacts your wallet. 

Some of you have tuned in for our Scam Series. You’d think we’d hit an end to those stories, but people keep approaching me to tell me about how THEIR family member got scammed or how someone tried to get THEM. A better home online enables us to tell these kinds of stories in a way where you can find them more easily, share them more readily. We hope our new site will take you into an era where you always can find the information that is most helpful to you and your family. 

We look to enable commenting in a way we haven’t been able to yet. We’re intending for this site to be YOUR site. After all, it’s named after you, The Citizen, who we serve, who we listen to, who we look to have the best possible information about what is going on locally.