The Newtown Bee’s website, newtownbee.com, is celebrating its 30th anniversary this month.

Launched in March of 1995, with an editorial in the Friday, March 17 issue of the print paper, then-editor Curtiss Clark described the launch thusly in a May 1995 New England Press Association bulletin: “So when The Newtown Bee announced in its old-fashioned, quaint, front-page editorial a few weeks ago that we could now be found on the Internet’s World Wide Web, people didn’t know what to make of it — it was like seeing grandma on water skis.”

The announcement made The Bee the first newspaper in Connecticut to have a web presence. For a bit of context, Danbury’s The News-Times launched its website in 1997, and The Voices did not launch its website until 2000. The Bee was truly a pioneer, and proof that even grandma can have a little adventure left in her.

The website offers The Bee’s staff the opportunity to provide most news stories on a daily basis after our print subscribers get first read; but in the case of breaking news, the staff can launch stories hot off the presses in advance of print publication. The website mainly offers staff-written stories and breaking news, maintaining the bulk of press releases and other informative items as exclusive to the print version of the paper.

That is not to say that the length and breadth of Newtown events needing exposure do not make it to the website — newtownbee.com maintains its monthly calendar, which we love to plug since it’s, frankly, a ton of work to keep a resource that includes every event in town, every day of every week of every month of the year.

Just on the publication date for this issue, Friday, March 21, there are 10 events listed, from St Rose’s Friday Knight Fish Fry served curbside from 5 to 8 pm, to a continued exhibit on Fairfield Hills at C.H. Booth Library during their regular hours, to a Bingo Night, also at St Rose from 6 to 9:30 pm.

The website has not only offered continued exposure to the rest of the world and more opportunities for The Newtown Bee to bring in revenue via advertisers, it also provides an absolutely invaluable resource to people who need information on Newtown. Google just about anything, from Newtown Historical Society to the Flagpole to Mary Hawley, and you will probably find an informative Newtown Bee story on it. The Bee’s website is a regular Newtownpedia, a highly informative wealth of facts and snapshots of the lives of Newtown’s residents. Managing Editor Shannon Hicks’s ABCs of Newtown is one of the best resources in The Bee’s catalogue for Newtown information, with the most recent entry being on Queen Street.

Even as we look back to our past, the future of The Newtown Bee is also undeniably its website. As fraught as it is for local newspapers, with The Bee being one of the few publications left standing and one of the fewer still family owned, online is clearly the way forward. Many formerly print news sources such as Newsweek and TIME magazine have become online only entities. So keep visiting newtownbee.com and support your local newspaper.