Dear Readers,

The last days have been frustrating for the NewspaperTree.com staff and readers because, as you may have noticed, our website address at www.newspapertree.com quit working Friday and didn’t come back online until today.

It was a technical problem, and everything’s up and running, but we owe our readers and advertisers an explanation.

We lost the right to use the NewspaperTree.com domain name on the Internet because the notice that we needed to renew it was automatically diverted to a junk mail file and we didn’t see it. Ever throw the water bill in the trash by accident and arrive home some days later to find the water cut off? Well, that’s essentially what happened.

We set up a backdoor address Friday, which many of you saw and visited after we put the link in our newsletters, which went out as scheduled.

While the episode was embarrassing, and we took and are taking a well-deserved mocking, it is also inspiring. So many of you contacted us with various levels of concern, anger, sarcasm, and curiosity. Love us or hate us, you want your NPT!

This publication started with the ideal to tell stories that were not being told in El Paso, primarily about corruption in local government. It emerged after a period in which the El Paso Herald-Post closed and ownership of media was being consolidated nationally. In El Paso in the late 1990s, with little competition, with no local ownership, the journalism was not as aggressive, not as vital.

Things are picking up. NPT has established itself, and the Internet has allowed bloggers to share their stories, rants, conspiracy theories and uplifting positive vibes about subjects ranging from politics to art to gardening.

We live in an epic place with epic stories: Immigration; the Drug War; our corner of the vast state of Texas; our internal civic battles about the size, shape and flow of the city; our role as the gateway to Mexico, Center of North America and a continental cultural membrane; and, to bring it full circle, public corruption.

It hasn't always been easy. It shouldn't be. Our friends and enemies do not allow us to rest, and we're always challenged to be timely, relevant, smart and, most important, right on target.

With your support -- reading us, talking about us, sponsoring us -- we will continue to do that, and do more of it.

Bill Moyers, in a 2003 speech, had this to say:

Journalism and democracy are deeply linked in whatever chance we human beings have to redress our grievances, renew our politics, and reclaim our revolutionary ideals. Those are difficult tasks at any time, and they are even more difficult in a cynical age as this, when a deep and pervasive corruption has settled upon the republic. But too much is at stake for our spirits to flag.

Amen.

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Sito Negron is editor of NewspaperTree.com. He can be reached at sito@epmediagroup.com.