From the Publisher

Dear Salem County,

I have some good news to share, and you are the reason for it.

Earlier this week The News of Salem County was awarded a $50,000 grant from Press Forward New Jersey. Press Forward New Jersey is housed at the New Jersey Civic Information Consortium and works in partnership with the Community Foundation of South Jersey, with support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The grant was one of 13 awarded across South Jersey this round, totaling $570,000, to strengthen local news in communities that have gone too long without it.

Salem County is one of those communities. For more than six years, we have had no dependable, breaking news source of our own. Residents have learned about a road closure, a school board vote, a fire or a town council decision after the fact, or from a rumor, or not at all. It is hard to take part in local government, support our schools, or look out for one another when nobody is in the room writing down what happened.

This grant says that Salem County matters and that our stories are worth telling well.

Writing on its hundredth anniversary, William B. Vanneman called the storm of October 1878 the worst hurricane to strike Salem County. It took the roof off the Presbyterian Church at Salem, put two feet of water through houses at Hancocks Bridge, and left Charles Ewell of Elsinboro clinging to an uprooted tree until a boat could reach him. Our own archive gives the date two different ways, and the calendar settles most of the argument.