Notices

By David Hunter, Publisher

In case you’ve ever wondered why there’s a dot between the words “Haddonfield” and “Today” on our nameplate – yes, “nameplate,” not “masthead” – here’s the answer:

In 2017, when we changed the name and format of “What’s On Haddonfield” to “Haddonfield Today,” we envisioned that one day there would be be a digital version of our new print publication.

That day has come.

If all goes well, Haddonfield [dot] Today (digital) will go live at about the same time that this issue of Haddonfield Today (print) arrives in your mailbox.[Saturday, March 21, 2020]

Initially, our goal is to enable the Haddonfield community to access – in one digital place – much of the Haddonfield information that currently resides in a variety of digital places. 

In that respect, Haddonfield [dot] Today will function as the paper does. We gather details about coming events from the borough, schools, community groups, congregations, sports teams, and the business community. We synthesize them and publish them in an attractive and user-friendly format that’s mailed townwide every two weeks, and placed at high-traffic locations around the town.

But Haddonfield [dot] Today will provide something the print version does not, and cannot: information about events that were created, or changed in some way, after the print version went to press. So it will be as up-to-date as … today.

In addition, it will carry some Haddonfield news, links to borough, school, and community sites, easy access to documents and forms, and connections to merchants, restaurants, professionals, and office-based businesses.

We hope you will check it out – on your desktop, laptop, tablet, or smartphone. We also hope you will send us details of coming Haddonfield events, so we can publish them not only in print, as we have done for nearly 30 years, but now online, as well.

By David Hunter, Publisher

Meditation, it has been said, is the mother of insight.

One famous example proves the veracity of that proverb. In 1665, with bubonic plague running rife, a student at Cambridge University by the name of Isaac Newton retreated to his home in the countryside. Sitting under an apple tree in the summer of 1666, he reflected on what made an object at rest (an apple) move in a particular direction (towards the earth) when it broke free from the tree.

The rest is physics history – past, present, and future.

With schools, colleges, and universities around the world now closed, to stem the spread of the novel coronavirus, students have an uncommon luxury: time to ruminate. Recognizing this, a professor of astronomy at Williams College wrote to the editor of The New York Times recently, expressing the hope that “the current situation leads one of today’s scholars to make a breakthrough” as consequential as Newton’s. Time will tell.

As meditation is the mother of insight, so necessity is the mother of invention. In an effort to grapple with new realities imposed by COVID-19, individuals, families, community groups, organizations, institutions, and governments around the world are, by necessity, inventing new ways to do what needs to be done.

So are businesses, including ours. 

To ensure that we at the Gumnut Group can continue to publish timely, accurate, and detailed information about coming events in Haddonfield, despite the certain loss of some advertising revenue to our print magazine, we’ve gone digital.

Our new digital product — Haddonfield [dot] Today – will not replace the printed product that Haddonfield residents and business owners receive in their mailboxes every two weeks. Rather, the print and digital versions will complement each other.

This is new territory for us. We’ve avoided the digital world for one very good reason: we’ve never been able to figure out how to inhabit it profitably. (Incidentally, we’ve never meet a publisher at the local level who has.) But, given the times, we have decided to try.

Perhaps the necessity of taking a novel approach in the current situation might lead to the invention of a new – and financially viable – way to spread the word about what’s on. Time will tell.

We hope you like what you see, and that you will send comments and suggestions for improvement.