Readers of the Ballard News-Tribune have told us they enjoy the columns we run on a semi-regular basis.

We found a writer of what is going on around her in Ballard who was doing fine on the Webtown of the Seattle Post Intelligencer, but we agreed what she had to say about Ballard was important at a more personal level, so we brought in Peggy Sturdivant. She never seems to be without a thoughful, funny or just plain unusual view of our wider Ballard community. We love the food reviews of our neighborhoods from Patricia Levine and Jim Anderson as they seem to find something new each week. History comes alive with Kay Reinartz because this woman has studied the vastness of Ballard and its growth from a thick forest. Occasionally, Jerry Robinson, our publisher, drops in to tell of some of the fascinating people in our community.

And, never forget Ballard cops, chronicled for good or ill by Dean Wong - leave that out of the paper at an editor's peril.

But we have failed to find a columnist to represent a group often left entirely out of modern newspapers, forcing them to the Internet and You Tube and Facebook, with some i-Pod tossed in.

We need a new teen columnist. One who lives and goes to Ballard High and lives to write and loves to view the world around you and how it affects you and your fellow teens. This person needs to be one who can express the concerns of his or her fellow teen, the stresses and the strains, and know how to tell that story to people who are not tuned into to teenagers. That same person must be able to tell his or her fellow teens of the world and what is happening in Ballard and environs.

We believe that when you hire a columnist, you let him or her do the writing and we do not censor or object to most things, for that is what a free press is all about. So the latitude is there to tell your parent's generation, and the wider public, how it is to be a high school student and a teen in this crazy new century.

To strart the process, e-mail me something about you and some ideas for a column that will be printed (and on-line) every two weeks (you have to meet deadlines). Send an e-mail to jackm@robinsonnews.com and we will take it from there.

- Jack Mayne