Happy holidays: YachatsNews and its staff are taking a bit of a break until Jan. 3

To our readers:

YachatsNews is going to take a break from daily news gathering chores from Monday, Dec. 23 until Friday, Jan. 3 to celebrate the holidays and also catch up with some administrative chores, long-range planning and complete some bigger stories.

That is, of course, unless a whale washes up on the beach, or a council or commission calls a special meeting on some urgent topic, or there’s another tsunami warning. Let’s hope not. It’s time for some peace and quiet and to celebrate Christmas and New Years.

If time allows, we will try to post important or interesting stories from our news partners around Oregon.

If you are reading this, you are among the thousands of people who visit the site daily or weekly to learn a bit more about what’s going on in Yachats, Waldport and oftentimes much of Lincoln County and the central Oregon coast. By Dec. 31, the YachatsNews site will have published 1,000 stories this year and recorded 2 million “page views” — the standard metric of news sites — which is a 25 percent increase over last year’s measurement and a massive increase from the 180,000 total page views for our first full year of 2019.

A sincere “Thank you” from all of us. As a 501c3 nonprofit, YachatsNews staff does this work because we feel local news is both neglected and important.

As we have said during fundraising campaigns in June and October, we want “to do more and better.” YachatsNews will have announcements to that effect in January.

Part of our motto is “Free to all, funded by readers.” If you want to help support our news gathering efforts before the end of the year with a tax deductible contribution you can:

• Write a check and drop it into the mail to YachatsNews, P.O Box 284, Yachats, Ore. 97498;
• Use the “Donate” button on the website to make a one-time contribution or small, regular monthly donation through PayPal;

Otherwise, happy holidays to you and your loved ones. Let’s all pledge to start 2025 with hope, strength and grace.

See you Jan. 3.

• Quinton Smith, editor; Garret Jaros, staff reporter; and freelance writers Cheryl Romano, Dana Tims and Kathleen O’Connor