Besides the noise of the political races for president, governor, Congress and the Legislature, we hope some things happen during 2008 in the more limited world inhabited by you and by us.

We have an important job these days, more important than it once was, because now the two big dailies have pulled back covering what our readers consider local news because of staffing freezes and a belief, it seems, that lighter news is what sells. The exception comes only when some dreadful tragedy like the killing of the six people on the Eastside on Christmas eve. That was covered well and appropriately.

There are blogs, of course, but they are mainly either the opinions of bloggers commenting on stories in the newspaper or what amounts to back-fence gossip. They are all fun and interesting, but facts often take little part of the mix, and there even is libel or worse.

But what about the myriad of things happening Ballard? What about the reality of our schools and the, we hope, peaceful takeover of the Seattle School District by four new directors setting out to work with a new superintendent hired by the last board?

We plan to focus the same attention as in the past on what really is going on in our schools.

The News-Tribune will not forget schools where many problems have surfaced, and we will look more carefully at our high school and find out how Ballard High stacks up with the rest of the nation.

City government and the seriously growing problem of the type of city we will have is something this newspaper will watch more and more. We think the City Council has been asleep at the switch here. The mayor seems to be too busy traveling the nation for a greener world or invested in spending money to make traffic worse and parking impossible to care much about the fact that we have a Condo Cancer that could destroy once wonderful Seattle. We ask and ask and ask and we still have nothing but political mouthings about where will the workers we need be able to afford to live.

We are going to soon have two new columns in the Ballard News-Tribune. We have a man who loves to ride bicycles and who knows the city and its traffic laws beginning a bicycle column, probably next week. Then we have a lot of speculative teen columns to read and hope to have that voice in the paper in just a couple of weeks.

There is one thing we would like to conclude with: This page is opinion, not balanced fact. Despite the big word "Comment" on the top of the page, we get frequent rockets asking how come we are so slanted and opinionated here. Well, on this one page in the paper that is our opinion and those of readers in letters and Op-Ed columnists.

Have a good year with us.

- Jack Mayne

jackm@robinsonnews.com