Go weekly, that is. And tell even more stories.

After all, it’s what we’ve been doing better than anyone else for the past 30 years: Telling good stories about good people doing good things. And to be honest, given our coverage for over a quarter of a century, that description would suit probably ninety-nine percent of what we’ve covered.

That’s just our way of saying what we cover hasn’t always been good news. At some point real estate numbers are down, sales tax collections may have slipped, unemployment goes up, and let’s not forget the fact there was so little positive to report during Covid 19. But even during Covid 19 and the insanity of “who’s more ‘essential” than who?’ based on Denver or getting the even more special 5-Star rating from the local “authorities,” one thing always came through: We still found good stories about good people doing good things.

And for that, we have to thank our readers and local businesses who brought us the stories and, of course, our advertisers for working with us to keep their ads in the paper and providing the funding for the Business Times to be printed. We’re continually amazed how time and again, the businesses of the Grand Valley find ways to succeed, survive and grow not only in good times, but through every kind of economic difficulty and, at times, disaster.

But here’s something we also found during and after Covid, not every “good” story is necessarily a story about someone or some business doing good. But we were too busy in survival mode to actually do something about it. To let our readers in on a little known fact going back five or six years, we’ve had several readers, business leaders and interested parties begging us to do two things: Go weekly and tell these other stories.

Even though we’ve been avoiding the weekly gig for many reasons (some good, some just plain silly), we made the decision it’s time let our readers know what’s going on — good, bad or indifferent — all from a business point of view.

It’s not because we want to play “gotcha” or for nefarious reasons. We believe our readers are genuinely interested in seeing comprehensive coverage on the institutions of the Grand Valley who have so much effect on the lives and livelihoods of its citizens. And we just see an opportunity to give our readers — and advertisers — more of what they want (more institutional stories is the number one request on our current survey) and invite others to have a look at how we cover these stories more and in depth.

And we believe we can do that, and already are making the content change in the last quarter of this year, while giving our readers a better experience and benefitting our advertisers with more exposure to more people while we grow the paper in size, scope and readership.

And while there will always be the quality profile stories you’ve come to expect from the Business Times at the heart of our newspaper model, just know you’ll also find in our pages a more unique, original take on these new stories. Read ours and compare it to what you hear or watch or read elsewhere. We believe you’ll see a difference.

Perhaps the difference you’ll see, as we envision, is a good newspaper doing good stories while doing good things for its communities.

We cannot thank our readers and advertisers enough for allowing us this opportunity. We can’t wait to see where it takes all of us!