Over the next few days, we will be running columns from some of our community leaders who will share their 2020 goals.

The Times asked them to do this because we feel it’s important to know what their priorities are as we go into a New Year. In the spirit of fairness, we’d like to also share our goals for 2020.

First is transparency. We want to be transparent with our readers about how we operate and why we do the things we do.

In this era of “Fake News” we believe it’s more important than ever for us to pull back the curtain on news gathering and reporting. People are suspicious of what they don’t understand, and we want to build an understanding of how newspapers operate.

You should have a basic understanding of how we get our news, the steps we take to gather and verify information and the decisions we make on what to cover or how we present it. We expect government to be open and transparent and think we should hold ourselves to the same high standards.

Second is accountability. One role newspapers play in any community is to hold local government accountable to the voters and taxpayers. We do this by covering meetings, but also by digging into the details and examining budgets, purchasing, policies and practices.

This is not meant to be negative reporting, but information that taxpayers should know. In 2020, our goal is to do more of this type of reporting.

We also want you to hold us accountable. Behind these pages are people, and people make mistakes. We may get it wrong sometimes, or miss a story that you think we should have covered.

When that happens, let us know and give us the opportunity to correct our mistakes. Because that’s what real newspapers do: when errors are made, they tell people an error was made and they correct it. They don’t simply update the information online and pretend like the mistake was never made.

Our third big goal for 2020 is to be the voice of this community. We have an Editorial Board and a Community Advisory Board, and in the New Year, we want to truly activate those boards to help us know what’s important to our readers and to make sure our editorials reflect the community we serve and the community we want to be.

As always, our main goal is to bring you the news of our community and to present it to you accurately and fairly. When something is an opinion, we’re going to label it as such so you know it is not a news story.

We’re excited to be going into 2020 with big plans, and we thank you for your continued support and readership.