Our family purchased its first Washington newspaper January of 2008 in nearby Shelton.

We soon took the Journal’s paid circulation to over 10,000 and in those days, that meant we could soon transform the weekly paper into a daily.

Within a year though, the stock market had lost 40 percent of its value, and the real estate market was following close behind.

In a bittersweet lesson in economics, our revenues remained steady despite the shuttering of businesses only because our legal revenue boomed with all the foreclosures on homes.

In those days of heady growth, prior to The Great Recession, I served as a sort of scout for our partnership - searching for newspaper markets that we could afford to enter where the newspaper was still vital to its community.

Half a dozen years later, there was only one newspaper on the Peninsula that I thought still served its community with passion, The Port Townsend Leader.

Like its sister in Shelton, The Leader has been trusted by its readers for generations, and the Wilsons, who owned The Leader at the time, were able to leverage that trust with the local businesses.

Most newspapers have long operated on a business model where its readers pay for 25 percent of the costs of publishing, leaving its advertisers to make up the rest. That model is inverting due in no small part to Amazon which has proven effective at providing everyone pretty much any product they want, delivered to their door. This of course comes with an equal and opposite reaction - the closing of locally owned businesses - which in turn, further diminishes newspapers’ primary source of revenue.

Amazon’s success is possible only because of the internet, the most revolutionary tool in our lifetimes. It was supposed to be a kind of great equalizer but alas, for all its promises, it just widened the gap between the haves and those with nothing.

That promise was an infinite amount of information for nothing. This “more for less” intention, ironically has instead delivered more money to less people.

Thank goodness for Port Townsend.

This community long ago recognized the value of family-owned businesses. The giant box stores have, for the most part, found little refuge here.

The businesses who advertise in these pages represent, by and large, family-owned companies. Most of our advertisers are locally owned which makes this newspaper still viable.

Local business owners understand the need to serve their community, despite the pressure of competing with the whole wide world on the world wide web.

That’s good news for you, dear reader because these advertisers are invested in your community, you can call them, email them, text them, or just walk in their front door and meet with them.

The businesses who advertise in these pages risk not just their money but the most precious resource they have, their time, to make a living for themselves and the families who work at those businesses.

They do it in the hope of providing their valuable goods and services at a reasonable price to their community.

We’re proud to support their efforts.