Have you discovered “Neighborly” in our newspapers yet? The name came from one of our readers as a description of our newspapers after the changes we’ve made in recent months. It is a place in the newspaper where you, our readers, exclusively produce the content.

You can find it typically on Page 2 early in the week in our dailies and on Thursday in our weeklies. It could be a five-day feature if you have enough items of interest to submit. And I’m pretty sure you have plenty of good stuff.

Am I still a bit too vague? Think special birthdays, anniversaries and other life experiences. We need to receive this information electronically. While this may be a challenge for some of you, our community editors need to spend their time writing at least 15 good stories a week. They just don’t have the time to retype anything more. The local libraries provide free computer services and you all know someone that would be happy to help you.

As I sit here on Halloween wearing my “Killer Clown” mask, I wonder what great photographs and stories you may have. There have been many great photo ops with all of the great events for Halloween in the area.

On the shopping side of things, we are also going to begin a column for local shopping news. This could be an upcoming event, an award or donation from a business. It is another way we can help our advertisers get the word out to you about the importance of shopping locally.

On another note, we are thinking about moving the Edwardsburg Argus and the Cassopolis Vigilant to Wednesday or Friday. Wednesday nights are extremely busy here as we produce our weeklies but also the Dowagiac Daily News, the Niles Daily Star and Off the Water. The move will allow us a little more time to focus on quality.

I will be leaving for New Jersey on Friday to visit my mom. Originally, this was to be a celebration of her 83rd birthday. We will be doing that although the timing is good for me to help with the clean up from the horrible storm from earlier this week. I will be checking e-mail if her power is back up by then, so please send your comments and ideas to me at Michael.bennett@leaderpub.com.