Taking time to look back at 2014

As we’re sure is the case with most of our neighbors, New Year’s Day is an opportunity at the Frontiersman to pause and reflect on the past year.

It’s just that our year has been clearly documented over the course of 150-odd editions, in full color, over multiple pages.

We think there’s value in that old newspaper staple of the year-in-review story, which is why you’ll find the second half of our 2014 iteration of that story in today’s paper.

It’s useful both to remind us all of what we accomplished this year — parades marched in, Science Olympiads won — and to catch us up on ongoing storylines — what’s up with the ferry or the Knik Arm bridge?

We have used a number of different methods to compile these year-end lists. For a few years our process was to have each reporter submit a list of his 10 best for the year and just shuffle them all together. We stopped that for a number of reasons.

Next we used our website to determine what the top 10 stories were, which had its own set of troubles.

This year we went old-school. We sent assistant managing editor Andrew Wellner to the conference room with a stack of a year’s worth of papers and marching orders to pick the most impactful stories of the year, even if they weren’t necessarily very dramatic.

The resulting list brought up some things we’d forgotten about — the young girl that landed a role in Les Miserables — and some we couldn’t help but remember — Dallas Seavey’s second Iditarod win.

We wrote about long-term issues we’ve covered as well. Some of these stories seem close to a resolution — the Susitna-Watana dam seems all but dead from our vantage point today. Some will continue for sometime — Veterans’ health care seems far from perfect. Some are just starting — the Wasilla Library is in the design stage.

As reporters, our job never stops. There is no time between stories or between editions to enjoy your successes. For us, this looking back exercise is a nice reminder of the people we meet and the places we’ve been.

It’s also a reminder of the sort of folks who live here and we have the pleasure to cover day in and day out. There is value in knowing that there are still good people in the world, ready to organize fundraisers when your home burns or your health fails.

The Frontiersman is a collection of stories about your friends and neighbors in the Mat-Su Borough published three times a week in print and online. It’s a magnifying glass that shows us how we are all connected — all 95,000 of us.

Thank you for supporting our efforts for the past 67 years. We look forward to many more years of covering news in the Mat-Su Borough.