It’s hard to believe we have been publishing Valley Response Magazine for almost two years. It seems like just yesterday that we were putting together our mock-up with both excitement and anxiety about how readers were going to receive our new and—as we like to consider it—cutting-edge publication. Fortunately for us, the response has been overwhelming and each issue attracts new readers.

Since we began publishing, we’ve experienced our fair share of growing pains: last-minute photo shoots, late articles, and a variety of other minor setbacks that inevitably put the staff into a state of panic. Funnily enough, if you asked anyone who works here, we’d all admit we secretly enjoy the rush of adrenaline that comes with putting the puzzle together and getting it off to the printer. It is only then that we all breathe a much-needed sigh of relief, as we high-five one another and congratulate ourselves that we’ve got yet another one down!

Growing pains aside, our current issue also represents a milestone of sorts: It is the first time we’ve made a small but significant leap in the magazine’s page count. Instead of 48 pages, we’ve grown to 56, which is not a feat we could have accomplished without the support of our loyal and long-term advertisers. In every issue we publish, we try to maintain a healthy balance between stories and ads. We strive to give our readers informative and interesting articles as well as provide a venue for advertisers to convey their message to local consumers.

We feel that we have finally begun to find our place in the community and have garnered the advertising support necessary to make a permanent name for ourselves within Tulare and Kings counties. We’d like to offer a big thank-you to our advertisers and readers; we would not be here without their contributions and validations.

We’ll continue to aim to be exactly what you’re looking for in a local publication. Our motto over the past two years has essentially evolved to, “If it isn’t working for you, it isn’t working for us.” So we ask our readers to continue to give us feedback about how to provide relevant articles that cover issues important to them. As for our advertisers: We’ve heard the wonderful things readers are saying about your ads in our magazine, but we’d like to hear how you feel about them as well.

Valley Response Magazine has become a mainstay here in our Valley and we hope that you, our readers and greatest supporters, are as excited about that as we are. We look forward to sharing many more issues with you in the months and years to come.