Enabling us to pay the bills is our crack advertising team led by Paula Emerson in Hillsboro and Tina Groening working out of our office in Marion. Elaine Ewert and Kevin Hower invest their design skills in production, pagination and maintaining our Web site.

Contributing their significant talents on the editorial side are staff reporters Jerry Engler, Laura Campbell and Andrew Ottoson. Add to that a rotation of seven top-notch columnists, three stringers, a puzzle creator and one off-beat cartoonist.

We depend on a team of 10 to 12 people, including several from the Hillsboro Senior Center, to help us work with inserts and prepare more than 7,000 newspaper for mail and delivery. In Hillsboro, we have a team of 10 able bodies delivering about 1,000 of those papers door to door every Tuesday afternoon.

That's a team of 40 to 45 people. They're all tremendous, and they're committed to the same thing the publisher and editor are: Bringing you the very best publication we possibly can. -DR