Readers of this newspaper have proved over and over again that they expect us to provide them with the information they need to access the necessities and the not so necessary enjoyments of life in our peninsula. We are making an important change this week to help this process.

For many years, the Community Calendar has served as the basic calendar of events, large and small; serious and frivolous. There is nowhere where such a full listing of events exists. So find it in the News-Tribune or find it nowhere.

But free services such as the Community Calendar are often at the mercy of the news of the week or the very size of the newspaper. For those who do not know, the size of any newspaper is determined by the amount of advertising it has each week. While editors, reporters and photographers are not beholden to advertisers for what articles they write or what photos are taken, they are recipients of a paycheck that is financed by those advertisers. Ads in this paper are the printed version of commercials on television, or pop-ups or annoying flashing ads on blogs and other Web sites.

The ebb and flow of advertising is often hard to anticipate, and this has left the newspaper at times with not enough space to print all Calendar items - although for those who don't know, all calendar listings are carried on our Web site, www.ballardnewstribune.com.

In any given week, we have upwards of 280 column inches of items sent in to the calendar by Ballard area residents and others with events of interest our readers. That is over three full pages (with no ads).

At the suggestion of our new Calendar editor, Jackie Harris, jackieh@robinsonnews.com, we are reconfiguring all the listings to be in date order. If your event is during the next seven days, it will always be in the calendar each Wednesday, and we will strive to have at least two weeks in the paper - even more whenever possible.

Longstanding and undated items will take their chance, so we urge organizations to send in dated events (with times, places and what is happening) on a regular basis. We do try to use this free space to the benefit of our readers, and that is why this important change has been made.

If you have any questions, you can call Jackie at 932.0300 or at the e-mail above, or call me at 932.0300 or on my cell at 369.6328 or e-mail me at jmayne@robinsonnews.com

- Jack Mayne