Welcome to our 15th anniversary issue.

While 15 years is a youthful milestone, it does make one stop and consider one’s blessings. In this anniversary issue the editorial crew has done a wonderful job of telling the story of NUVO through interviews with our previous editors, updates on original stories, time lines and retrospectives. Please enjoy.

NUVO (which stands for New Voice) had a difficult birth, like most small companies experience, especially in the crowded world of media and, particularly, here in Indianapolis, where a progressive voice in a generally conservative community had always spelled trouble for our predecessors.

But we have prevailed, primarily through a cycle of progress which has looked something like this: offer value to you, our reader, with whom the advertising community wants to communicate; and, with the support from advertisers, gradually elevate the skills and experience of our employees so that we can provide even more value to even more readers.

I am grateful to our readers, our advertisers and to all of our employees past and present for making the story of NUVO such a successful one.

The value we continue to offer is grounded in the philosophy of this organization. At the risk of sounding self-important, NUVO’s mission is to support the communal celebration and debate concerning the values of freedom and equality. We attempt to do this by having an internal culture flexible enough to push this dialogue forward and then to use this understanding in how we choose and approach stories and in the advertisers we share with you.

This dialogue has naturally moved us towards trying to practice what we preach. For instance, we celebrate in our pages those who intelligently support the environment and we are critical of those who don’t. So we have chosen to reduce our own environmental impact by making our building and our operations less wasteful. This past year we were able to switch to 80 percent recycled newsprint and have partnered with a citywide newspaper recycling program. These efforts were recognized by the Hoosier Environmental Council, which awarded us with their Green Business Award.

As we approach NUVO’s 20th anniversary, our local ownership, company culture and your positive responses will allow us to experiment with new ways for us all to communicate. Technology is bringing new rhythms of contact that are more instantaneous than the weekly one that defines our paper. If you visit us at www.nuvo.net, which is celebrating its 10th anniversary this month, you can participate with us in this adventure.

You can also engage us in real time and in real space in the next few days. Please join us on March 11 at the Vogue, where we will be celebrating our 15th anniversary with a gathering of our readers, advertisers and present and former staff members.

Thank you again for your support and for the opportunity to serve.