By Rob Holbert Managing Editor

I still remember the heady days when we first started this enterprise you’re currently holding in your sweaty little hands. Year four, I assumed, would be full of days spent on the company yacht watching the Lagniappe-bred Oompa-Loompas spreading coconut butter on the Lagniappe Bikini Team.

Of course, that was a pipe dream – one I’m not really sure fits in with the goals of good journalism or a marriage free from divorce proceedings. After four years, the closest I get to a Lagniappe yacht is when the Moon Buggy is sitting in the flooded backyard of the spacious Lagniappe country house/compound during a tremendous thunderstorm.

And while we’re still about three months away from breeding our own race of miniature orange-faced helpers, we’ve officially scrapped the bikini team idea. (I like to think it’s just on hold.) We’ll have our Oompa-Loompas handle some light copyediting and then send them out to infest the Press-Register’s giant new high-rise delivery boxes/street-hawker condos.

OK, maybe the “Oz” thing is stuck in my head mostly because my daughter wants the movie as a Christmas present so she can wake up screaming about flying monkeys, but there is something a bit Ozlike about the last year for those of us toiling to bring this area an independent, local newspaper.

The beginning of 2006 was a bit stormy – a holdover from 2005 – but we started to see the other side of the rainbow pretty quickly. (OK, that’s the last of the “Oz” references, unless I can’t think of anything better at the end.) When you start a business, everyone runs around saying, “You’ve got to be going for three years before things start to happen.” And no little business axiom has proven more apt, except perhaps the one about not keeping kegs in the communal kitchen.

This is certainly the first year where the vast majority of people didn’t say “Ghesundtite” when I called and said I was from Lagniappe. The rate of having to spell the paper’s name plummeted as well, to around 40 times a day.

We started 2006 in our old digs in the Tower on Ryan Park, which had served us well, but were getting a bit cramped. When the Tower sold and new management wanted to jack up the rent, it was time to skedaddle. Unfortunately, the new Press-Register boxes weren’t on the streets yet, or we could have just set up shop in one of them and still had room for an executive racquetball court.

Instead, we moved into a 3,500-square-foot, 150-year-old house, and the change brought a new attitude and some great new sales people and things took off. And as a bonus, the move apparently threw off the crazy woman who had been bringing by insane hate notes written on toilet paper (unused, I pray!) for the past few years. That alone made the move a winner.

The new pad even has its own ghost, although it only makes a little bit of racket from time to time. Oh, and there was that time it possessed associate editor Kevin Lee for a week or two, but actually he was much more outgoing and positive while under demonic possession, so we didn’t mind – aside from the occasional projectile vomiting and levitating.

And while the financial ship started to right this year, we felt like editorially we were full speed ahead. This year we added a real estate column, as well as one dealing with county politics. We also debuted our new Web site in December of last year, and established it over the course of 2006. Most tech geeks agreed it was an improvement over our old Web site, which mostly featured nude pictures of former mayor Mike Dow exercising in Washington Square. (You’ve got to get up REALLY early to catch him doing that.)

In recent months, we’ve added more arts coverage, with a compendium cleverly called “Art Gallery.” Hopefully it offers readers a chance to discover the many artistic options available in the area. And beginning next issue, we’ll round out our arts coverage with a poetry and literary column edited by Jeff Goodman. We also started our popular “Police Blotter” column, which is chock full of some of the more ridiculous calls made by Mobile’s finest.

From an advertising standpoint, 2006 was a watershed for us, as the paper continued to attract more and more advertisers. The improvement in ad lineage coupled with increased reader interest allowed us to move circulation to 20,000 papers beginning in October. That 30-percent increase in circulation has allowed greatly increase our number of distribution points.

Of course, our plight has been helped by the general improvement of the area as a whole. Things seem to be booming in the community. It’s the kind of boom we expected about six months after we started publishing, not three years. Oh well, better late than never.

As we’ve grown and accumulated a few more resources, we’ve tried to be more than the “bar pamphlet” Uncle Henry dubbed us when we first published in 2002. We’re committed to continuing to find the stories and offer the opinions you won’t see in other area publications. And we’re going to continue doing it in a way that’s fun and interesting to read. We have some pretty exciting plans for the coming year and I’m sure we’ll have some stories you won’t want to miss.

Thanks to every one of our readers and advertisers who helped make this our best year yet. If the Lagniappe yacht is ever up and running, I’ll invite y’all over for a drink with the Oompa-Loompas and the bikini team.

Rob Holbert is Lagniappe managing editor. Contact him at rholbert@lagniappemobile.com.

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