What’s our 2025 resolution? To get fatter

Another year has come and gone in our beautiful state, and in just a few short days we will march into 2025 as we always do — full of excitement to be a small part of your lives as we strive to provide you with informative and entertaining stories that help you make sense of the world around you.
Of course, it is also prudent at this time to reflect back upon the past 12 months, as we depart a year in history that certainly did not lack in newsworthy events, both locally and nationally.
In some ways, we enter 2025 much as we entered 2024 — concerned about bridges. Both the physical ones and the more abstract kind.
The infrastructural crisis separating our east and west bays continues to disrupt hundreds of thousands of daily commuters without a true end in sight. Although there has been progress made towards finding a firm to build a new Washington Bridge, and progress in finding federal funds to build it, there is still much more work to do.
Considering this now marks the second consecutive year where the usually jolly month of December instead brought Rhode Islanders another bridge-related debacle. This year’s holiday surprise was a cyber attack on RIBridges, which left a majority of the state vulnerable to identity theft. We fear that rebuilding trust in government might be just as monumental a task as rebuilding a physical bridge. We hope our local and state leaders are up to the challenge and learn valuable lessons from both crises.
Our most important resolution will be to continue to watch and report on the biggest issues facing Rhode Islanders. From the unaffordability of housing, to record levels of food insecurity experienced by residents, and the worsening effects of climate change causing unprecedented flooding and ecological distress, there is no doubt that 2025 will carry over a vast number of complex problems that require dedicated attention and targeted efforts to tackle.
While many people look ahead to a new year as a chance to get back to the gym and lose the pounds they racked up over the holidays, here at Beacon Media we vow instead for the opposite.
We resolve to get fatter in 2025.
A fatter newspaper means more stories covering the issues coming out of your city and town councils, school committees, and municipal bodies of all kinds in between that make the decisions that most impact you. Fatter stories mean bringing you more context, more research, more perspectives, all with the underlying mission to cut through the noise of our modern media landscape and help you understand what is happening, and why it is happening, without bias.
The new year will bring about plenty of unknowns. Many of these will be out of our hands, such as the transition of power in Washington, and increasing strife throughout the nations of the world. However, we resolve to track and report on issues, regardless of where they originate, if it becomes clear that they will have a local impact.
But for us to fulfill this resolution to a satisfactory degree, we also rely on all of you to bring something to the table. Bring your questions, your critiques, your news tips, your grievances, and your success stories. Bring your belief that local journalism still matters and bring your trust in us to deliver it on time, every week.
From all of us here, we wish you a happy and healthy end to 2024, and a joyous start to 2025.