Sunday's paper will continue a tradition at The Citizen of looking back at the biggest stories of the past year.

It's something that plenty of newspapers and magazines do in late December, and readers seem to enjoy it. Perhaps what they enjoy most, though, is debating whether the right choices were made for these lists.

With that in mind, let me give you some background about the criteria we use in choosing our top 10 stories of the year.

You should know that these are the stories we viewed as having the biggest impact on the community. As a result, some of them involve negative stories, perhaps items that many of us would rather forget. But this is not a list of the 10 most uplifting stories (though maybe we should try that down the road as a supplement to the 10 biggest stories).

These are the stories that got the largest headlines, the ones that generated the most letters and online posts. They typically grabbed the attention of a wide swath of readers, not just the people who are interested in one topic or another.

I encourage everyone to provide your feedback on the list. What big story did we miss? Which ones are we giving too much attention? Is our No. 2 story something that really should be No. 9?

Send us a letter to the editor. Post comments at the bottom of the online version of the story at auburnpub.com. Call the Two Cents line (but remember to keep it at two sentences or less).

Now on to some housekeeping matters:

€ Fans of the Fox Trot comic strip probably are aware of this by now, but the strip's creator has decided to stop creating a daily version in 2007. A Sunday strip will continue, and we'll keep running that.

This happened rather quickly, so I didn't have much time to gather input for a replacement strip in our Monday-through-Saturday editions. We chose a strip called Sherman's Lagoon by Jim Toomey. I think you'll enjoy it. Here's how the strip's Web site, www.slagoon.com, describes it:

“Sherman's Lagoon is an undersea cartoon featuring a dimwitted shark named Sherman, his sea turtle sidekick, and an assortment of other coral reef critters who team up to battle the encroachment of civilization on their remote tropical paradise.”

€ We have launched a new community events calendar on our Web site that should be easier to navigate than the way we had previously posted events. Instead of a giant list of events that you have to scroll through, you now can pick a date on a calendar, click on it for that day's list, and then click on individual events for more information.

But the best feature of this new calendar is that it allows events to be posted by the public. The submitted events are quickly reviewed and then posted online for the rest of the world to see (sorry, we're not going to post your 21st birthday party).

Executive editor Jeremy Boyer's column runs Saturdays in The Citizen and he can be reached at 253-5311 ext. 231 or jeremy.boyer@lee.net