Last week, a great quote by Maya Angelou came up on my page-a-day calendar that I'd like to share with you: "Each of us has that right, that possibility, to invent ourselves daily. If a person does not invent herself, she will be invented ... so to be bodacious enough to invent ourselves is wise."

While I believe that this quote rings true for our own personal journeys as human beings, I think it can also apply itself to the world of tangible objects and, hitting closer to home, it can apply itself to what I am hoping to accomplish with The Abington Suburban.

I've been here a little more than a month and I've loved every second of it but, for those of you who know me personally, you know that I constantly seek to better myself and, when it comes to my writing, I try to make each new article better than the last one.

When I was finishing my master's in journalism at Regent University, part of my final thesis dealt with the use of multimedia outlets, especially social networking, in journalism. My first two first-place awards in the Pennsylvania Newspaper Association's Keystone Press Awards were in the category of "online special projects." As you can tell, integrating the digital world with the print world is very important to me because I believe in my heart that it is what traditional print newspapers need to do to keep up with technological trends.

I'm asking all of you to indulge me a little bit with the new "experiment" I am attempting with The Abington Suburban. I have created our Facebook, Twitter and YouTube sites and, over the next few weeks, I am going to begin to integrate these into the way this newspaper reports news. I've already videotaped a few instances that will, hopefully, work well with some articles I plan to run in the near future and I've been diligent with "tweeting" (@TheAbSuburban) and posting to our Facebook page (www.facebook.com/TheAbingtonSuburban).

While I understand that not everyone enjoys using the computer, I would like to use these new tools as a way to have a better dialogue with all of you. After all, this is your newspaper and you should be as much a part of it as possible. If you don't use a computer, I am still available by phone at 348-9185 ext. 5429 so please don't feel left out! If you still haven't told me your love story for our Feb. 9 edition, there is still time - things like that transcend the digital and the print worlds.

This coming Friday, Jan. 27, Community Newspaper Group managing editor Julie Imel, advertising representative Micah Woodard, marketing coordinator Amy Brown and myself will be at Duffy's Coffee House, 312 S. State St., Clarks Summit, from 10-11 a.m. We would like to meet as many of you as possible and Mari, Edwin, Erin, Andrew and the rest of the staff have been gracious enough to let us come up and hang out with all of you for a little while. We are grateful for this opportunity to get to know all of you and are looking forward to it.

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