PUBLISHER'S POINT OF VIEW
Five years gone by
by Robert Hooftallen

Today, the Endeavor turns five years old.

Some days it seems like we've been at this a heck of a lot longer; on others, it still seems brand new.

We're going to spend a bunch of money on our birthday so you can indulge in more of us!

Over the next several weeks, we will be uploading past issues of the Endeavor to our website. All 260 issues (or at least as many as we can locate) will be in the archive section of our website. There are close to 4,000 pages in all and they will be free to everyone- our gift to you.

Log on to www. endeavornews.com and click on the news archives link. From there you can read past Endeavors, issue by issue for the past five years.

You can also use our search engine on our front page to find anything that has appeared in past editions. It's a really great tool. Type your last name in, for example, and tell it to search. It will bring up every instance in which your name has been used in the Endeavor.

Uploading is going to take some time to complete. We will start from the first issue: April 12, 2003. By the time you read this, there should be several editions already uploaded.

For those of you who have been with us that long, the old issues will bring back memories of thousands of things you thought you had forgotten.

Meanwhile, the archives will help our newer readers get a feel for the short history of the newspaper and how it has progressed in the past halfdecade.

The production of the newspaper has changed dramatically in the past five years and I think it will change more drastically over the next five.

Printing and delivery costs continue to rise, yet the number of print subscribers at all newspapers continue to decline.

We love our print subscribers and, frankly, wish we had thousands more, but the truth is, the cost to maintain a print subscriber base is at the point of diminishing returns. Quite simply, there's no profit in it.

That's been true, or nearly so, for quite some time, but publishers have been willing to break even on subscriptions because they were bait for the real money- advertisers.

But today, the internet is quickly displacing print newspapers. While readership of print newspapers is declining at alarming rates, electronic readership is growing at the same newspapers at an ever faster pace.

Consider this: Our website now averages over 12,000 hits per day. People visit our site from nearly 600 different computers every day. If we stay on this pace, we'll reach the half-million-hits-per-month plateau by the end of the year.

Those are numbers we won't ignore.

In the past five years, we've grown in so many ways, personally and professionally. And we've learned this business well.

But, the next frontier awaits. The day is coming when weekly newspapers won't be weekly newspapers at all. They'll be electronic news casts that change every day.

They'll include sound and motion.

They'll be much like TV but better, enabling you to call up watch, read, listen and learn at your leisure.

You'll point and click from our site to schedule your next appointment with an auto mechanic. You'll email your dinner order to your favorite restaurant.

It's a limitless medium that awaits. We're going to try to get you there as quickly as possible.