On Shoulders Hill Road Sunday, another road I rarely traverse, the shell of what I assume will be the North Suffolk YMCA has gone up practically overnight. Downtown growth continues with a slew of new business and professional establishments expected to open in the coming weeks and months.

With that in mind, it was not difficult for us to select a theme for this year’s Horizon’s edition: “Horizons 2006: Watch us Grow,”

will be published on consecutive Sundays in February and we’re gearing up here for our biggest and best Horizons edition ever.

We launched the effort two weeks ago with a party at which we distributed our “Horizons Plan” – the in-house guide to what stories we’ll be writing, photos we’ll be taking, ads we’ll be selling and what they cost, production deadlines and schedules, etc.

As usual, we’ll be seeking help from readers in producing this section. Frankly, Horizons is too large of a task for the News-Herald’s small staff to pull off alone. It takes reader submissions to make Horizons sing and there will be plenty of opportunities for you to contribute.

Once again we’ll be soliciting nominations for the News-Herald’s Citizen of the Year, announced each year at the culmination of Horizons on the last Sunday in February. We will also have a section recognizing Unsung Heroes contributed from readers.

But there will be more. We attended a seminar on Friday at which we brainstormed ideas to include more input from readers. We came up with various photo pages and themed sections that will really open Horizons 06 up to our community.

“Watch us Grow,” actually has double meaning for us this year. Over the past several months the

News-Herald has embarked on a project to expand and improve the design and content of our community’s newspaper. We’ve been working with newspaper designers and editors from other newspapers, and while it’s taken a little longer than I originally hoped, I’ve found that doing it correctly involves a lot more than I originally thought;. But it’s finally starting to take shape.

The new News-Herald will include more lifestyle content, more “fast fact” type tidbit information; better organization, design and typography, better photographs and most importantly, like in Horizons, more reliance on our readers and people in the community who are not readers, for content.

This will necessitate adding pages to the paper on most days and we’re confident it’s something you will like.

Last week we completed the prototype pages for the redesign, and over the course of the next six to eight weeks, we will be putting finishing touches on it, creating detailed style and content guides and training staff members on how to put everything together to produce an exciting, breezy, relevant, intensely local package of information every day.

Current plans call for launching the redesigned News-Herald on Sunday, Jan. 1, 2006. Between now and then you’ll likely be hearing more about it, and you’ll be hearing a lot about Horizons.

Andy Prutsok is publisher of the News-Herald.