One of my favorite TV news segments is "Everybody Has a Story" on KIRO TV Channel 7, CBS morning show. Every Friday, someone stands with their back in front of a map of the United States and tosses a dart over their shoulder. Wherever it lands, that's where the camera crew goes. Once in town, the reporter closes his eyes, flips through the pages of a phone book, and picks a name at random. Whoever answers the phone is who they feature on a "15 minutes of fame" segment.

Quite often, the stories are quite poignant, very interesting, and intriguing. Because after all, Everybody has a story. You just have to know how to look for it.

At the Jet City Maven, we've adopted that motto. Our goal is to someday write about every single business, organization, politician, and interesting individual in our coverage area of North Seattle.

As we meet people, we often wish we had more room to write more features and more breaking news articles. You can thank our advertisers as well as the individuals on these two pages for funding our goal. Newspapers are very expensive to operate. It's a labor of love. Every little bit counts.

We also feel very blessed with the wonderful staff we have had over the last year. A combination of volunteers, interns, free-lancers and contractors, we finally hired our first "real" employee this year. It's all part of the growing process.

We hope to build up this newspaper so that it can thrive in any bad weather for as many dozens of years as possible. It is a long road, building a paper from scratch, but we are happy to say we are reaching our goal.

In the meantime, we count on you - the community - to be our extra staff member, to be the eyes and ears that let us know about the news that is happening in your neck of North Seattle.

And we count on you - local businessmen and women - through your advertising dollars to help us continue to provide a large a newspaper as possible in which to share the news with the community.

Thanks again,

Susan and Clayton Park,

Co-Publishers, The Jet City Maven