Ned Powers, Ken Noskye, Shannon Boklaschuk, Elaine Hnatyshyn, Tammy Robert and Reena Nerbas are back on board.

We were flattered that so many of our readers emailed, texted or took to social media to say they missed the Express. The StarPhoenix published a letter from a reader who said she missed us, and that our closing left a hole in the community. That was kind of her.

The Express, like most newspapers these days, was struggling to stay in business. We were grateful that the owners gave us a fair shot to try to increase advertising sales to the point of profitability. Advertising in the Express worked; there just wasn’t enough of it to keep the paper chugging along.

Our general manager, Dan Senick, thought a new version of the Express could work, and came up with a new model. He actually came up with a number of models before settling on this one.

Part of that model has already been used. Since the closing of the Express, we put out two publications. One was a Seniors Guide and the other a program for Shakespeare on the Saskatchewan. We would like to thank Hamlet, Macbeth and Ophelia for that.

We are going to start slowly, but the plan is to do a paper each month, with the hope of increasing the frequency in the fall. The press run will be reduced and door-to-door delivery removed. The paper will be found throughout the city in newspaper boxes and on racks. There is a pile of them.

To stay in touch with our readers, we will ramp up the website. It will include content not available in the paper and will be updated much more frequently than the old one. The plan is to have our columnists write for the web, and to add information from various other sources. The website will be up and running in September.

On it we will tell you where roadwork is being done and provide you with information from the Saskatoon Police Service. We will publish news releases, so groups can get their messages directly to you.

We are going to have photo packages from city events; we have been out shooting events such as the opening of the Nutrien Wonderhub children’s museum, the Pride Parade and Canada Day festivities. We know the importance of staying in touch with the city we serve. That and an outstanding batch of writers set us apart.

With a website, the sky’s the limit when it comes to content. One feature our previous site included was a scroll of advertisers, and we’ll continue to provide that. Links will send customers from our site back to the advertisers’ Facebook pages. It is a feature that isn’t being used in Canada as best we can tell.

We promise to be more active on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Our team — advertising specialists Carol Trapp and Aaron Shutra, and designer Wanda Losie — is excited to be back. We hope you will look for us in your travels around the city, and online come September.

-Cam Hutchinson