The new year opens with this issue of the Gazette-Journal, and we embark upon the Good Ship News for another voyage across the calendar. We are not sorry, as a paper, to bid farewell to 2025. It was a jangled year of mysterious and hard-to-fix mechanical issues in our production department. We are grateful to our readers who hung with us as we worked through the problems. Sometimes, living in these water’s edge communities of Virginia, we may feel that the troubled world can’t get to us. But all too soon we are back in touch, absorbing the strife within our nation and around the globe. It’s part of modern life. The ransomware cyberattack that struck the paper in September reminded us that we are firmly planted in the world. Our readers had to find more patience as we got our systems up and running again—without paying the ransom. As 2025 disappears, we are so grateful to our readers, advertisers and friends in all part of Gloucester and Mathews for their unfailing cooperation and suppo...