This year's Fourth of July parade in Saratoga Springs was dedicated to the memory of fallen soldier Pfc. David Taylor Miller, who died in Afghanistan two weeks ago. (ED BURKE/The Saratogian)

SARATOGA SPRINGS — Spa City turned out in red, white and blue Saturday for a parade kicking off the city’s weekend-long Fourth of July celebration.

As usual, there were colorful floats, marching musicians, cheering children and even a harness horse pulling a driver in a sulky.

But this year was different in one major way.

Two soldiers led the procession from the corner of Van Dam Street down Broadway, carrying a banner bearing the name and photo of Pfc. David Taylor Miller — a solemn reminder, in the midst of a celebration, that one of the city’s own gave the ultimate sacrifice to his country just two weeks ago.

Miller, a 19-year-old Saratoga Springs High School graduate with the Class of 2009, was killed June 21 while serving with the U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne Division in northern Afghanistan.

He and another soldier in his unit died from wounds suffered in a suicide bomb attack while they were manning a checkpoint.

He had volunteered to help organize the All-American Celebration in years past with his mother, Leslie Forbert Miller, who was on the steering committee for the event this year.

“This is the least I could do for Taylor Miller and his family,” said Private Eric Vanwagenen, 19, who carried one end of the banner honoring his friend and classmate from Saratoga Springs High School. “He was one of the most motivated people I knew. He’ll never be forgotten.”

Pfc. David Taylor's mother, Leslie, right, shares an embrace with a friend after Saturday's Fourth of July Parade in Saratoga Springs. The parade was dedicated to Taylor Miller, who was killed in Afghanistan on June 21. (ED BURKE/The Saratogian)

The two enlisted in the Army together last year at the recruiting station in Wilton, where Sgt. First Class Paul Drew, who carried the other end of the banner, first met Miller.

“He was not only a recruit, but a good friend,” said Drew, 33. “He was a great kid. To have someone like him as a recruit was a breath of fresh air.”

Jack O’Brien, 80, of Wilton, marched with the Korean War Veterans Association Chapter 60 in the parade.

“Anytime we lose a veteran, it’s moving,” he said, with tears in his eyes. “As a combat veteran of Korea, it’s understandable how the family feels and we wish them the very best and our prayers are with them.”

Other local groups and officials were represented, including Fife and Drum of Olde Saratoga; the Saratoga Springs High School cross country, track and field teams; Saratoga County Board of Supervisors and the City Council.

Following the parade, Miller’s friends and family formed a small crowd in front of city and county officials in Congress Park as Mayor Scott Johnson read a proclamation in honor of the fallen soldier and dedicated the 2010 celebration to his memory.

Several people wore T-shirts bearing an image of Miller’s face or the words “Local Hero.”

“He was a brave individual. He was the most special child, and not just because he’s my nephew,” said Jim D’Iorio, who came to the park with his son, Jimmy, and his wife, Suzanne, all wearing matching T-shirts in Miller’s honor.

“Taylor gave the ultimate sacrifice while on duty at traffic point in Afghanistan,” Johnson said. “Taylor will be remembered as a true hero, who fought for our liberties, including the freedom to hold a festival such as the All-American Celebration.”

Paola Martin holds down the fort with sons Jaydon, 1, and Landon, 4, as her husband, Petty Officer Brandon Martin, below, prepares for deployment that will keep him away for seven months. (ERICA MILLER/The Saratogian)

SARATOGA SPRINGS — Turning onto Quiet Harbor Road you might be pulling into any cookie-cutter housing development — quiet rows of well-kept homes on tree-lined streets and children laughing in their yards and on playgrounds. The families that live in these houses, however, all have something very distinct in common: at least one member of each family is a member of the U.S. Navy stationed at the nearby Naval Support Unit.

They are a tight-knit group, despite the fact that families regularly arrive and depart from the neighborhood, based on the whims of the U.S. Navy.

Jennifer Bennett has lived in Saratoga Springs with her husband, Petty Officer Kristopher Bennett, and their two children, 4-year-old Skyler and 2-year-old Kristopher, for about 15 months. Even though they haven’t received any word that a move is coming, Bennett said she is always in “prepare-to-move mode.”

Her daughter has already lived in three states — Hawaii, Maine and New York — and her son in two.

With her husband assigned to Saratoga Springs “this is the most normal his job gets,” Bennett said. The worst part is “shift duty” when he is assigned to work late-night or overnight shifts, but there are none of the months-long submarine deployments they’ve experienced in other parts of the country.

April Bermingham and her husband, Chief Petty Officer Paul Bermingham, have been stationed in Saratoga for about for years. From her perspective, travel is one of the perks of their military life. They lived in San Diego and New Hampshire before being sent back to her native Saratoga, which is where the couple met. Next spring they will move to Guam with their two children — they have a 2-year-old, Magnus, and Bermingham is expecting another son in the fall. They were given several options and chose Guam as their next move because of the opportunity to travel around the exotic locale.

“One of the biggest pros was that we could expose our children to different cultures and have them be a little more worldly,” Bermingham said. “It’s something we wanted to do while our children are small.”

The cycle of moving around factored into the Berminghams decision to have children. “We decided to wait until we were going to be somewhere for any length of time before we had kids,” she said. For the first two years of their marriage they lived in San Diego and Bermingham’s husband was out to sea. She only saw him for four months during the two years. “I knew what i was getting into, so it wasn’t a surprise,” she said. E-mail was the best way to connect, but even though they wrote to each other most days, because he was stationed on a submarine the e-mails would come in periodic batches of 50 or more.

“Since he’s on a submarine he would be down for a month or two at a time so there would be no contact during that time,” she said.

Bermingham’s husband hasn’t been deployed since they’ve had children, but she said that day is probably coming.

“It’ll be different, but luckily I’ve gone through it before we had kids so i know what to expect,” she said. “I don’t try to worry about things that are not under my control.”

The last time Bennett’s husband was deployed, her daughter was 8 1/2 months old. During that six-month period, her husband missed a lot, she said.

“Skyler said ‘daddy’ the day before he left. When he came home, she was starting to walk,” Bennett said. He hasn’t had a deployment since their son was born. The next time he is, which she knows will be on the horizon eventually, “is going to be different.”

The frequent moving is familiar to Bennett. “My dad was military, so I moved a lot,” she said. “It’s the only lifestyle I’ve ever known.”

“I always expect we’ll have a month notice (before a move),” she said. “I never feel like the bottom’s dropping out.”

Two weeks ago Paola Martin spent an afternoon watching her sons, 4-year-old Landon and 1-year-old Jaydon, play in the backyard while piles of bins and boxes were visible in her living room through a sliding glass door. Martin and her husband, Petty Officer Brandon Martin, moved last week to their fourth Naval assignment. After spending three years in Saratoga Springs, the family is now stationed in San Diego.

Martin said she was sad to leave Saratoga, but it comes with the territory. She and Brandon were high school sweethearts and when he considered enlisting, “it was a decision we both made.”

The biggest challenge on Martin’s horizon is her husband’s upcoming deployment, his first since enlisting. He will be away for seven months.

Martin said she is “freaking out” about the prospect of her husband being gone for so long.

“(The kids) won’t see him for seven months. Seven months is a long time when they’re this little,” she said.

Her husband is worried too: “He’s just worried about missing out on so much.”

Bennett said that in her experience, missing out on family time is the hardest part for the deployed men and women. Her daughter’s first Christmas and first birthday both occurred during her husband’s deployment, but were “like any other day” for her.

“Times like that are harder for the guys than us,” she said, because they can spend their whole day thinking about what they’re missing with no way to communicate with their family.

She made a habit of sending her husband CDs full of pictures of their daughter while he was away.

What helps the wives get through is the camaraderie they find in Naval housing communities or near Naval bases, they said.

“They become your second family,” Martin said. Even on “shore duty,” as they refer to assignments like Saratoga Springs, the wives lean on each other to get through the long nights when their husbands are working late shifts. Dinners, support groups, and play groups for the children all “help get your mind off of (your husband),” Martin said.

Still, “there are days when I’m just waiting for him to get home.”

Theresa Mejia and her husband, Petty Officer Jeff Mejia, have three children — 8-year-old Arianna, 6-year-old Kiara, and 3-year-old Madden — and have lived in Saratoga for about three years.

Wherever they’re stationed, “our friends become family, because that’s all we have,” she said.

The longest period she’s gone without being in contact with Jeff was 37 days, she said, while he was stationed in Washington and regularly deployed on submarines.

“You worry that they’re missing things,” she said. But she never worries about his safety. “I don’t have time to worry about that.”

Bennett said being a Navy wife is a small blessing while the country is engaged in two desert wars.

“I actually don’t know how some of the Marine wives and the Army wives do it,” she said. “I’ve never been scared for his safety … He’s safer on a sub than we are here.”

Joe Craig, a ranger at Saratoga National Historical Battlefield, mops his brow as he sits, dressed in Revolution-era garb. (ERICA MILLER/The Saratogian)

STILLWATER — Joe Craig was loading Twinkies onto bread trucks when an opportunity came to serve his country and the American people.

It wasn’t in the military, but another branch of the federal government, the National Park Service. Not long afterward, Craig found himself working at the Statue of Liberty for the 1976 bicentennial celebration, and now he’s a ranger at Saratoga National Historical Park, better known as Saratoga battlefield.

Today, clad in colonial-era clothing, he’ll be reading the Declaration of Independence where about 20 people from all parts of the world will become new U.S. citizens during naturalization ceremonies scheduled for 10 a.m., at the park.

“It’s a little reminder of how different the country is from when it was founded,” Craig said. “The Founding Fathers’ ideals are what these people are looking for — life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That’s our mission statement when you come down to it.”

Originally from New Jersey, where he studied history at Rutgers University, Craig has also worked at Ellis Island, Edison National Historic Site, Morristown, Delaware Water Gap and Grant’s Tomb before coming to Saratoga.

“I just swam upriver from Hoboken,” he joked.

Peaceful, idyllic, 3,000-acre Saratoga battlefield, with views stretching into Washington County farm country, is a far cry from the jam-packed Statue of Liberty mob scenes he encountered.

Regardless of where rangers find themselves, the requirements are the same, Craig said.

“I kind of like the fact that we’re slower-paced here,” Craig said. “There’s more time to interact with people. You have to like people. Sometimes they’re having a difficult day, it’s hot out. We are a service. We’re here for the people of the United States.

“You also have to be good at public speaking and have some kind of history or education background. I get nature, archaeology and geology questions all the time. It’s nice to have a general knowledge of things.”

At Saratoga, he’s especially fascinated by each participant’s involvement — either by choice or by chance.
Some British soldiers enlisted in the army for economic reasons. The alternative might have been debtor’s prison, where they likely would have starved to death.

People living in this part of the country were caught in the middle, and had to make difficult decisions, whether to remain loyal to the king or join the rebels and fight for independence.

“It was a civil war,” Craig said. “What a lot of people forget is that it drags on long after Saratoga.”

The Battles of Saratoga were fought in September and October 1777. Yorktown, the war’s last major battle, didn’t occur until October 1781, four years later.

Various battlefield features are a microcosm of choices and consequences that unfolded during the Revolution. Neilson Farm was owned by a family that took up the American cause. In con- trast, the Freeman Farm was owned by John Freeman, a Loyalist. His 12-year-old son served in the first battle. After Saratoga, the Freemans became refugees and would be wiped out by smallpox.

Other people, such as tavern owner Jonathan Bemis, were somewhere in the middle — not entirely committed to one side or the other. Unfortunately, information that might have told more about Bemis was lost forever in a 1911 archives fire.

Open year round, the park gets about 150,000 visitors per year, some who want to learn just about its critical role as a turning point of the Revolution, others who enjoy the site’s various recreational offerings from bird watching to cross-country skiing.

In addition to the battlefield, the park has several other components — Schuyler House, Saratoga Monument and Victory Woods, a new 22-acre site near the monument that just opened this spring.

“When we got the Schuyler House we got a little extra and it wasn’t cable TV,” Craig said.

A previous owner, from the 19th century, had kept the skull of Thomas Lovelace, a Loyalist spy who was hanged in Schuylerville. When the park service acquired the house, officials found the skull in a glass case.

Now, it’s fittingly interred near the park visitors center, one of many intriguing things Craig enjoys telling people from around the globe who come here each year.

“That’s one of the fun parts of the job,” he said. “You meet people from all over the place.”

The reception desk in the lobby of Saratoga Hospital sports a new banner notifying its Facebook and Twitter pages. (ED BURKE/The Saratogian)

SARATOGA  —  Tweeting, blogging, updating a Facebook status, sharing videos — these social networking actions have become an integral part of the daily routine of professionals in various industries.

Media outlets are now regularly using free services like Twitter — the microblogging site that allows users to post 140-character “tweets,” or text-based posts, and follow the tweets of other subscribers — to report breaking news and drive traffic to their home sites.

Businesses large and small are creating profiles on social networking websites such as Facebook and MySpace as a tool for no-cost marketing and advertising.

Even school districts, including local ones in Ballston Spa and Saratoga Springs, have jumped on the digital bandwagon, and are interfacing with parents, staff and students through e-mail and text message alerts about snow days, safety issues and early dismissal times.

Nonprofit organizations are no exception to the growing use of social networking in the workplace.

The Saratoga Hospital Foundation, for example, started a hospital-wide Twitter feed in February and just joined Facebook.

“It’s something that we found to be helpful in spreading our message and informing people about our events,” special events manager Rachel Wheatley said. “We have a lot more options now rather than just a simple press release — we have four or five ways that we can reach our target audience.”

As the fundraising arm of Saratoga Hospital and all of its off-site centers, the foundation is using its Facebook fan page and tweets to drive Internet traffic back to its home website. From there, people can make online donations to the foundation, which is in the midst of a $1 million fundraising campaign to support an MRI and orthopedic specialty center at the hospital. As of the end of June, about $600,000 had been raised, according to Wheatley.

“Facebook and Twitter is important because you want to redirect people back to your website,” Wheatley said. “It’s more of a tool to get information out about what we’re doing rather than a direct tool for donating. People only donate through the website.”

Wheatley, 31, has held her position at the foundation for four years. But the use of social networking sites and other technologies, like the Flip video cameras she and her coworkers hope to have in hand soon, have only recently taken off, she said.

“For me, it’s second nature because I’ve had a personal Facebook page for a few years now,” she said. “(But) the foundation didn’t use any type of social networking when I started other than the website.”

Employees at other local nonprofits said their use of social networking sites at home made it easy to integrate into their professional lives.

“The staff all used Facebook in their personal lives. We saw other businesses jumping on the bandwagon and thought why not do it too?” said Courtney Bissell, coordinator of development and volunteers at Franklin Community Center in Saratoga Springs.

FCC has been using Facebook for a year and now has almost 300 “fans,” or other Facebook users who click on the page to show they “like” the human service organization. Posts like “Food Pantry SOS! We’ve been helping so many people lately that we can’t seem to keep our shelves full! If you’d like to donate to our pantry, please bring non-perishable items by 10 Franklin Street Monday – Friday, 8a-4p” solicit support from the community a few times a week, while the photo album section shows the smiling faces of children in FCC’s Project Lift program.

Other Facebook posts provide links to local media coverage and give “thank you” shoutouts to sponsors, Bissell said.

“We’re really trying to pull in new donors and keep people updated quickly about new events at our center,” Bissell said. “It’s a nice way to communicate with business supporters in the community as well.”

“It’s very easy, it’s very simple, and you can reach a large audience quickly,” said Julie Denardo, volunteer public affairs group officer for Girls Inc. Cornerstone, the fundraising arm of Girls Incorporated of the Greater Capital Region. The Albany- and Schenectady-based group is part of a national nonprofit organization that provides after-school programs and summer camps to underprivileged girls.

Denardo said Girls Inc. Cornerstone has been using Facebook and LinkedIn for at least six months as a way to keep people engaged who are involved as volunteers, beneficiaries or staff.

On LinkedIn, which allows registered users to build a network of professional contacts through people they already know, Girls Inc. Cornerstone is a member of the Capital District and Upstate New York Professionals group.

Denardo said being part of the online group lets her and other officers start online discussions, post news about the organization and interact with people from other nonprofits and businesses in the region.

Girls Inc. Cornerstone uses Facebook to announce scholarship winners, post information about upcoming fundraising events, and provide links so people can register or RSVP online.

“It’s really easy for people to register and pay for an event online,” Denardo said. “That’s where the market is going.”

Other posts, like videos and photos of young girls from the Capital Region who participate in Girls Inc. programs, act as testimonies to the organization’s mission.

Bissell envisions a blog in Franklin Community Center’s future where staff could post in-depth stories that would supplement, or even replace, their paper newsletter.

“Using the Web for a blog instead of the newsletter would cut costs on mailings and help us be more current,” Bissell said.

According to social media strategist and Internet marketing guru Melissa Ward, this is exactly how nonprofits should be using social networks, but they could go further.

“(Nonprofits) have a good edge over regular commercial businesses because they have really heartwarming stories to tell. Don’t be afraid to share those stories,” said Ward, a managing partner of the Ballston Spa-based Web development business NewWard Development LLC.

She suggests that employees, volunteers and sponsors of local nonprofits share the stories about why they got involved through individual blogs, Facebook fan page notes or YouTube videos.

“If you’re writing a blog, you can plug links to it into Facebook and Twitter,” Ward said. “It’s kind of like writing once and you can spread across all your networks at once. It can take as little as 10 minutes a day.”

The strategy should always be to drive traffic back to the website, she says. Website traffic trackers like Google Analytics can measure the effectiveness of the organization’s social networking.

“It’s not just about asking for donations or promoting events — it can be so much more compelling than that,” Ward said. “You have to pull on people’s heartstrings, because people get involved because they have an emotional investment in the cause. Getting other people to make an emotional investment has to happen before anybody makes a monetary investment.”

With their names — their real ones.

In observing the nation’s birthday, we commemorate the basic freedoms woven into its fabric — high among them, the freedom of speech secured by the First Amendment of the United States Constitution.

It is no small thing for citizens — and the news media — to be guaranteed the right to write or speak their mind without fear of government reprisal or censorship. Other countries fall far short on this liberty that many of us take for granted.

But what’s “free speech” worth when you don’t know who’s doing the talking?

It takes courage to speak up with your name attached. Anonymous commenters lack the credibility of those whose reliability can be assessed by virtue of their identity.

Yet there are sometimes good reasons to protect someone’s identity. It has its place in advancing thought, kindling public discourse, and exposing wrongdoings or shortcomings with an eye toward positive change.

And anonymous commentary is nothing new.

Go back to the 1780s and the Federalist Papers — the compelling essays advocating ratification of the Constitution. The authors were later determined to be founding father Alexander Hamilton, the first U.S. Secretary of the Treasury; James Madison, the fourth U.S. president and the “father” of the Constitution; and John Jay, who became the first chief justice of the United States. A credible group, we’d say.

Yet at the time, the Federalist Papers were distributed under the name Publius — the Roman consul known as friend of the people.

Even with their identities shielded, the authors of the Federalist Papers stood out as articulate, persuasive, intelligent, thoughtful and civil.

Yes, civil.

On the other end of the spectrum are the people who’ve come to be known in the Internet world as “trolls” — anonymous commenters who get their jollies spewing venom, spreading lies and being just plain hateful.

Every online publication deals with these creeps, some of whom will be unable to resist commenting on the online version of this editorial. Some trolls who frequent The Saratogian site reappear with new email names as soon as their old one is banned, and brag about beating the system.

An article titled, “Unmasking the Anonymous Online Loudmouth,” in the magazine section of the June 20 Boston Globe, makes it clear that trolls are everywhere, and there is no single way to deal with them.

One owner of an online news site in the western New York city of Batavia told the Globe that the number of people commenting increased when they began insisting on real identities “because they know who they are arguing with.” A founder of an early online news publication in Minneapolis told the Globe that media companies should let people comment anonymously, but collect their I.D. information to weed out troublemakers. However, troll types would probably lie about their names and addresses.

The Internet makes it so easy to speak, question, converse and comment — and there’s nothing in the First Amendment that says freedom of speech requires an I.D.

The Founding Fathers understood human nature, at its best and its worst.

So while we lament the hateful talk protected as free speech, we’ll take the bad with the good — with the fervent belief that respectful, civil voices will prevail.

Happy Fourth of July.

David Hernandez, the head chef at Circus Cafe in Saratoga Springs, proudly became an American citizen for the sake of himself and his three children. (ERICA MILLER/The Saratogian)

SARATOGA SPRINGS — People rock to the Bruce Springsteen song, “Born in the USA,” while taking the privilege of citizenship for granted.

Not David Hernandez, the head chef at Circus Café on Broadway.

Hernandez is a Mexico City native and one of the millions who have gone through the lengthy and somewhat challenging naturalization process to become a U.S. citizen.

He did it not just for his own benefit, but so that his three children could have a better life, too.

“The difference is you have more opportunities,” said Hernandez, who lives in Schuylerville. “I’ve got a good job and I can raise my kids here, where there’s no violence.”

One of the requirements of citizenship is learning how to speak, read and write English, which has helped Hernandez immeasurably. He’s also extremely proud of passing the American history and civics test.

Applicants must study 100 potential questions. The test includes a multiple choice test with 10 of those questions, of which at least six must be answered correctly.

Examples:

How many people are in the House of Representatives?

How many years are senators elected for?

Which is one of the two longest rivers in the United States?

“I bet you can ask some American people who just got out of school and they don’t know this,” Hernandez said, smiling.

In addition to language and civics proficiency, basic requirements for becoming a naturalized citizen are:

• 18 years of age.

• Lawful permanent resident for at least five years. This starts the day an immigrant with legal documentation first arrives in the U.S.

• Half those five years must be spent on U.S. soil.

• Good moral character, determined through interviews and background checks.

“I am an extremely proud American,” said Constance Sebast, a teacher from Fort Johnson, near Amsterdam. Originally from Canada, she became a U.S. citizen in 2008 during the annual July 4 citizenship ceremony at Saratoga National Historical Park. Her adopted Russian-born son, Gorsha, is also a naturalized citizen.

“Sometimes I think I’m more patriotic than people who were born here,” Sebast said. “I have voted in every election since I became a citizen.”

All prospective citizens must first complete a mandatory application (Form N400) that comes with a $675 filing fee. Then an interview is set up with Citizenship and Immigration Services officials.

Depending on location, the testing process could take from a few to many months. For example, the New York City office is much busier than the closest field office in Latham, so applicants have to wait longer in the city.

The United States welcomed more than 5.6 million new citizens in each of the past two decades (19912000, 200109) and more than 744,000 people in fiscal 2009 alone. Some permanent residents serve in the U.S. military before becoming official citizens. Since September 2001, Citizenship and Immigration Services has assisted more than 55,000 soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines in becoming naturalized citizens.

Sebast said she’s glad her naturalization ceremonies took place on Independence Day.

“Every July 4 I do remember,” she said.

For information about becoming a naturalized citizen see the website: www.uscis.com.

But it wasn’t put together in the usual way.

Most of the news and photographs on the pages, and the layout of those pages themselves, were prepared for publication without using the usual newsroom software for writing, editing, toning, cropping and paginating.

Instead, all this work was done using free software available to anyone on the Internet. And yes, it was hard work. The proprietary software is designed to be efficient, reliable and relatively fast for the task of producing a daily newspaper. The free substitutes, not so much.

So why did we do it? Crazy? Maybe. Tired? Definitely. Proud? You bet.

The free software experiment is part of the Ben Franklin Project of the Journal Register Company, which owns The Saratogian, 17 other dailies and a slew of weeklies and has been expanding its online presence with a content-driven, digital-first mentality that reflects where the world of communication is today and where it’s headed.

Part of the Ben Franklin Project is to push us newsies into active engagement with the public as a matter of course in planning, developing and reporting news. The buzzword is crowdsourcing. While it’s not a new concept, the Internet and social media in particular eliminate any excuses about reaching people and making citizens part of the process of shaping their news. That’s the ongoing part of the Ben Franklin Project, which recognizes that our No. 1 product is news content, whether you’re in print or online.

The Ben Franklin Project’s one-shot deal is the preparation of all daily newspapers in the Journal Register Company using free software for publication on the Fourth of July, a symbolic declaration of independence from proprietary software. Last month, a weekly and a daily in the company did it successfully, so the bar was raised for today. It’s a bit of a publicity stunt within the journalism industry, and it’s working. The industry has taken note of remarkable strides in attitudes and practices of the Journal Register Company spearheaded by John Paton, the CEO who has taken the company out of bankruptcy and is leading it into a digital-first world.

The Ben Franklin Project also demonstrates that the technology to publish is out there for anyone to use.

But between us, producing today’s paper wasn’t easy for the newsroom. News Editor Paul Tackett has been working days and nights, on top of his usual job, to set up most of the day’s pages in a layout program called Scribus. In the community, Tackett may be an anonymous editor, but you know him through his compelling page designs.

For today’s print edition, Tackett has duplicated the familiar components of The Saratogian from scratch, with the goal being that you won’t know the difference between the look of today’s paper and tomorrow’s. Likewise, photographers Erica Miller and Ed Burke have used free software (SeaShore) instead of Photoshop for their pictures, and the reporters have filed their stories in Google Docs instead of Microsoft Word. Online Editor Steve Shoemaker is posting video and stories to a free website, in addition to the regular site at saratogian.com.

It’s been a team effort involving other departments of The Saratogian as well as the newsroom.

We in the news industry take great pride in publishing, no matter what the circumstances – and news companies have faced natural disasters much more challenging than anything Journal Register Company CEO John Paton or Ben Franklin could throw our way.

Just wanted to share with you the story behind Sunday’s newspaper, to publicly commend The Saratogian team, and, as always, to invite your comments.

Barbara Lombardo is managing editor of The Saratogian. E-mail her at blombardo@journalregister.com or comment on her blog, Fresh Ink.

These pets give our seniors a reason to thrive every day as they nourish and care for a living creature. To so harshly demand that the seniors have to evict their birds in a week, or face the hard emotional toll to relocate themselves, is just mean!

This is not a burden that should be placed on our seniors, who have already been tried and tested by the tides of times. Perhaps the Saratoga Springs Housing Authority could review its regulations and policies to accommodate a positive effect for the residents and their emotional well-being.

Sometimes our pets are the only reason we welcome the days of our golden years. Every morning, we have a friend who depends on us, and we are still needed. My heart goes out to all the residents who will have to bear the burden of this very sad separation from their companions. The housing authority could at least amend the rules to allow small pets on a case-by-case basis and be part of something good and supportive for our citizens who have the greatest needs.

Michele E. McClure
Town of Saratoga

They are not alone. Most people are appalled by the devastation of animal life by the Gulf oil spill, yet subsidize the systematic killing of other animals for their dinner table. They know that meat and dairy harm the environment and their family’s health, but compartmentalize this know ledge when shopping for food.

And it goes beyond dietary flaws. We tolerate the killing of innocent people when our govern ment and media label them terrorists; we ignore the suffering and starvation of a billion people, except when our government and media tell us to care because an earthquake or tsunami has struck.

Our society would benefit greatly from more original thinkers, and our personal diet is a great place to start.

Sean Sewell
Saratoga Springs

This mother, in spite of the urgings of everyone she knew, took a day off from work to have her day in court. The time of the case was delayed because the police officer who had issued the ticket arrived an hour late. The mother waited. At the beginning of the “trial” the judge asked the prosecutor if the woman was offered a plea, and the prosecutor responded that the woman says she was innocent. They both chuckled.

Everyone knows how this ends. She hadn’t committed the infraction and she wouldn’t plead guilty to something she didn’t do. This was a personal sacrifice to expose a miscarriage of justice. Nobody noticed. Well, someone noticed. It gave the judge a good laugh.

The simple fact is, local governments across this country use traffic infractions as a supplemental income, and we let them. What’s worse is the vast majority of people I’ve spoken to take this for granted. When I relate the story of the mother of two to them, they nod and say she didn’t have a chance.

I’m sure there are a lot of reasons that can be given why the current traffic court system is necessary, and I’m quite confident that many protestations to what I’ve written today will appear reasonable. Nevertheless, the truth will remain the same. If a police officer gives you a traffic ticket, you better accept it and pay your fine, because you don’t have any thing but the superficial right to justice.

Roger Pink
Schuylerville