For those of you who love your hometown newspaper, you may have noticed the Tribune is not up to its highest quality standards the last few months. This new year has been a challenging one for this newspaper.

We lost a very good employee when she resigned to take care of family members. We also lost a part-time employee when she died unexpectedly at the age of 59. We miss her joyful presence here. Then to top it off, longtime employee, Edie Wurgler made the decision to retire after a career that has spanned beyond 25 years of dedicated service. Fortunately she has agreed to work here very part-time in her retirement to help us out. Strany Harmel who had dropped to part-time a few months ago has announced his decision to retire, as well. He has been here almost as long as Edie and is just as dedicated. We will miss these very wise people on our staff.

Most people here in Rugby know we only have five regular employees when we are fully staffed. You readers can only imagine how we have been limping along trying to do our best with only half the staff.

So we move forward with many changes in our staff, in our way of doing things but most of all we continue to work toward always producing a quality newspaper for this area.

Please have patience with us as we work out all of the kinks without four very experienced people. We have made mistakes and we are working hard to correct them.

Our work has our names on it and we will continue to provide the best product we are capable of producing. We have hired Paige Haman as office manager and she is being trained by the best. There is a lot to learn in that job and she is catching on very quickly. We have also added Rex Larson, Towner, who also works for the Minot Daily News a few days a week. He is currently here at the Tribune on Thursdays and is our layout designer. He will be coming on Wednesdays, as well, in a few weeks. I fully expect the paper to improve as we go along.

In the meantime, we work as a team like we always have. Everybody does what is necessary to get the job done whether or not it is in their job description. I am very proud of this team who just never gives up.

We may be making some changes to our services in coming months. Our first and foremost goal must always be to record and reflect the happenings of this county through our newspaper. A community newspaper has an important role not only in recording data and documentation for history’s sake, but also to provide pertinent information to the community’s residents in a timely manner.