By Michael Durand

Congratulations to the organizers of this year’s Lunar New Year Night Market and Parade held on Saturday, Feb. 7 on Outer Balboa Street. It was a fabulous event that drew more than 5,000 neighbors and friends to the gathering. The weather cooperated, which made the afternoon and evening truly lovely.

Before I took over as editor of the Richmond Review and Sunset Beacon newspapers, I spent 35 years working as a corporate event producer. I was a meeting planner, a senior meeting planner, a supervisor of nine full-time meeting planners and then started my own event production company.

I am intimately familiar with the pressures of being in charge of large events. There are literally thousands of details that need to be arranged to keep everything under control.

The team that works to make the night markets so successful are great at their jobs. They handled the logistics with expert skill to bring everything and everyone together create truly memorable community event.

Thank you to all involved for stepping forward and taking on the huge task of making the magic happen. Great work!

Delivery and Distribution

Thanks to our advertisers and our generous donors, we distribute 18,000 copies of the Richmond Review (and another 18,000 copies of the Sunset Beacon) to the neighborhood each month. That’s not enough to hit every house every month, so our delivery team starts at the edge of the Pacific Ocean and works east, delivering to homes between the Presidio and Golden Gate Park. About 15,000 papers are delivered to homes.

The rest of the papers are dropped off at, libraries, book stores, laundromats, coffee shops and other local businesses. Go to our website to see a full and recently updated list of our distribution locations: RichmondSunsetNews.com.

Speaking of our website, it has been averaging 25,000 views per month. We publish many things you won’t find in our papers, including press releases, letters to the editor, poetry, photography, commentaries and other features.

We have plans to add even more content to our site. Our paper has attracted many writers who are interested in contributing to the papers. Writers are like any other artist – we have a drive to create.

When I took over the papers seven years ago, we had about eight to ten writers on our staff. Now we have a list of close to 50! I am delighted to report that many of them are young students, a couple as young as 14 years old – and they’re really talented. Our oldest writer is 87. She is also very talented.

Soon we will be beefing up our website with the work of our new writers. Check it out.

Michael Durand is the editor and publisher of the Richmond review and Sunset Beacon newspapers and the RichmondSunsetNews.com website. He can be reached at Editor@RichmondSunsetNews.com.