How fast the year flies by.

Here we are again, marking the end of another year of successes, setbacks and change for Vashon-Maury island.

At The Beachcomber, our job is to faithfully chronicle those chapters, demand transparency and answers from decision-makers and the powerful, and capture all the idiosyncrasies that make up our community.

I — meaning Alex, the paper’s editor — would be remiss if I didn’t thank the people who made it all possible.

There’s our staff, including reporter Liz Shepherd, who earned a first-place award this year for News Writer of the Year from the Washington Newspaper Publishers Association. Without her highly skilled and tireless coverage of local news, and her deep catalog of knowledge of the island, I simply could not do it.

Publisher Daralyn Anderson, who oversees the staff and the paper’s budget, and marketing representative and administrative coordinator Pat Seaman, work just as hard. This year was also our last with former Beachcomber reporter Paul Rowley, who has helped us for years behind the scenes even after moving to Cleveland. Our team is small but mighty.

Legendary freelancers Leslie Brown and Eric Pryne have, like Wonder Woman and Superman, swooped in to shed light on some of the most complicated, confusing and controversial stories on the island — each out of a real love for Vashon and for journalism itself.

Similarly, our two young freelancers Mari Kanagy and Aspen Anderson — the latter of whom served as The Beachcomber’s intern this fall — have admirably covered a smorgasbord of stories big and small. The next generation of reporting superheroes, they’re both beacons for the future of this challenging industry.

Regular Beachcomber contributors Mary Bruno, Bruce Haulman, Terry Donnelly, Patrick Call, Susan McCabe, Phil Clapham, Beth Lindsay, Tom Conway, Bianca Perla, Kathryn True and many, many more help us tell so many stories of the island which we’d otherwise miss. Photographers Ray Pfortner, Jim Diers, John Decker, Kent Phelan, Corinne Sherry, Marla Smith and Tom Hughes help us tell those stories in visual form.

The team at VashonBePrepared — including Vicky de Monterey Richoux and Rick Wallace — continue to help us share important safety messages with the island.

Thanks are also due to all of the coaches, such as Bruce Cyra, Stephen Murphy, Shanti Escovedo, James Batey, Delany Steele, Ken Jackson, Eric Frith, and the brothers Anders and Per Lars Blomgren, who help us cover our island athletes with their expertise, enthusiasm, photography and writing.

There are many more names, of course, and we’d run out of ink trying to catch them all. So thank you to everyone we didn’t name who helped.

And we must thank every person we’ve interviewed or quoted for trusting us to listen. We live — or die — by the trust our readers and community place in us: Trust that we’ll quote you correctly, trust that we’ll cover stories sensitively, trust that we won’t mangle the spelling of your name.

I believe we usually succeed. But please know that we always try our best, and that we are committed to the important journalist practice of publicly owning up to our errors and correcting them.

So finally, thank you, too, for reading and subscribing to the paper, which gives us a new opportunity every week to tell the story of our community.

Happy holidays.