It was small comfort to have been proven right. We were terribly disappointed that the production quality of the paper that was delivered last week was not in keeping with our standards. That's why we asked our printer to reprint the paper and why we delivered it a second time. We'll continue working with the printer and tweaking to ensure that our final product matches the quality we promised when we first announced that the Almaden Resident was arriving.

The publication of a newspaper is a constant reminder of the importance of teamwork—all the way down the line from the staff meeting where editors and reporters talk about the stories and photographs they are working on, to the people who deliver the papers. In fact, I think one of the things I like best about putting out a newspaper is that so many people own a piece of the final product. And only through teamwork is a successful product produced.

It's a lot like a community. Or the way a community could be if people are really engaged in the life of the community.

I love working for a community newspaper because I know that if we do our job right, we can be the catalyst for making the community even stronger. And strong communities are important because, simply put, life is better when people feel connected to each other.

I've always believed that, but the idea gained momentum for me a couple of years ago when I read Bowling Alone (Simon & Schuster, 2000). The author, Robert Putnam, is a public policy professor at Harvard University. In the book, he argues that the more connected people are to each other, the stronger the community functions—especially in a democratic society.

He backs his theory with massive research that makes a strong case that in the second half of the 20th century, people became less and less connected to each other and, thus, to their communities. The result, he says, is that people don't trust each other as much or help each other as much; they don't come together to solve problems; they don't vote or participate in the democratic process as much. In other words, people who are not engaged in the community, who don't participate with their neighbors are less likely to vote, and that's not good for the future of our democratic society.

From church attendance to club membership to, well, bowling leagues, people just don't connect with each other the way they used to, and Putnam maintains that this poses grave dangers to our democratic society. There are lots of reasons why people have less civic engagement than they once did—long commutes, long work hours, high mobility, women in the work force, and the lure of television and video games to name a few of the more obvious.

One thing in the book that caught my eye was this " ... newspaper readership is a mark of substantial civic engagement." The more people join clubs and participate in community activities the more likely they are to read newspapers and the more likely they are to do all these things, the more likely they are to vote.

I think that community newspapers have a uniquely strong role to play in the process of encouraging civic engagement because within the larger community, people welcome the refuge of their smaller communities—the place where they do their grocery shopping and send their kids to school or take a class at the community center. The local community is the place where people can exert the greatest control over their lives. We believe a strong community newspaper plays an important role in this process not only by reporting the news, but by serving as a forum for community dialogue.

Letters and opinion pieces from our readers can engage others in local issues, thus giving these issues a good airing—not to mention battling the trend toward civic disengagement.

We don't discount the importance of state and national politics, but we also know that it's much easier for people to make their voices heard at the local level. Frankly, we think a lot of people feel more passionate about the installation of a traffic light at the corner of a busy street in their neighborhood or the renovation of a neighborhood park—or whether their local service station will have to replace service bays with a mini-mart—than they do about many national issues.

We hope our Almaden Valley readers will consider our opinion pages a community forum. By sharing your thoughts with your neighbors, we'll all come to have a better understanding of who we are as a community. And we'll be more engaged in civic life.

In my own understated way, I guess what I'm saying is: Write letters to the Almaden Resident; the very future of democracy may depend on it!

Dale Bryant is the Executive Editor of Silicon Valley Community Newspapers which publishes the Almaden Resident. She is a longtime resident of Almaden Valley. Contact her at 408.200.1021 or dbryant@svcn.com.