As more and more stories, story ideas, general e-mail, snail mail and phone calls come into our office every day, we are becoming increasingly overwhelmed.

With the growing interest in lighthouses, it seems every reporter, every person working on a lighthouse school project, every person working on a documentary, and every person with a lighthouse question contacts us.

In the process, we have research ongoing for future stories, current story fact checking, advertising sales work, and subscription promotion projects. And, of course, we have people stopping by to visit us.

We just want to ask you, our readers and friends, to please be patient with us. We may not be able to return every phone call, e-mail or answer every question on a timely basis. Unfortunately, for various reasons, some e-mails, correspondence and phone messages keep going further and further to the bottom of the stack. In fact, it’s gotten to the point where it’s almost impossible for our small staff to answer and return every phone call and e-mail while effectively completing a magazine that is published 11 times a year as well as doing our volunteer work.

Don’t get me wrong, we are not complaining. All of our problems are good problems.

You might say, “Why don’t you just hire more people?” Well, the answer is simple; we don’t have enough subscribers to be able to afford to hire additional staff. In fact, some of the people that help us now are volunteers. The goal of this magazine is to promote lighthouses, lighthouse preservation and education while documenting, reporting and saving the history of lighthouses.

The best way you can help us save lighthouses is by helping us get new subscribers, either by word of mouth or as gifts to others. Although we need to make a living, none of us are doing this for the money. We’re doing it to tell the stories of our lighthouses for this generation, as well as future generations, which in turn draws more public attention to saving the lighthouses and the history associated with them.

Timothy Harrison

Editor & Publisher

This story appeared in the March 2005 edition of Lighthouse Digest Magazine. The print edition contains more stories than our internet edition, and each story generally contains more photographs - often many more - in the print edition. For subscription information about the print edition, click here.