PA Independent will not be publishing any new material over the holiday weekend so our staff can spend time with their families and friends.

However, in the spirit of Thanksgiving, we will take this opportunity to put aside briefly our natural journalistic cynicism and say thank you to our readers who have made our first year such a success.

As a non-profit journalism project, PA Independent publishes stories for the sole purpose of having them read. Without your visits to our website (hopefully you have us bookmarked by now), we would have no reason to be here.

We say thank you because your visits have grown impressively over the last eight months. In fact, we’ve had an increase in the number of people visiting our website every month since April, and our monthly traffic has doubled during that time. November has already surpassed October as our best month yet, and we hope the growth will continue into next year.

So thank you.

We also thank those among you who have taken the extra step and contributed to directly support this project. Your generosity is greatly appreciated and we are working hard to give you a return on your investment.

We also want to thank anyone who has reprinted, reposted or re-tweeted any of our stories in the past year. Thank you for helping us reach readers in new and different places.

Finally, we want to thank our regular sources, because you add incalculable value to our stories each week. We also want to thank anyone who has ever submitted a tip or a comment to our website, because you never know where that will lead. And one last round of thanks to the lawmakers, politicians and public figures of Pennsylvania, because you gave us no shortage of content in 2010.