2011 is coming to a close so we thought it would be fascinating to look back on the year's most read articles.

We're taking you on a journey through space and time, revisiting the stories that grabbed your attention as each month passed. These stories reflect our community and the events that shaped it over the last 12 months.

In an amusing twist, our April Fools Day stories 'Approval given for Port casino', and 'Lagoon design may be discriminatory' were two of the highest read stories of the year, but not quite high enough to pip Gary Hunt's take on the lagoon process which also ran in April and got the community talking.

Internally it was a busy year for The Newsport with the introduction of regular feature writers and the launch of our Sport page. We'd like to take the opportunity to thank these passionate contributors who have written reports about their chosen sport or field of expertise. You've added an important and entertaining element to the site.

The standard and sheer number of our Best Photo Competition entries also blew us away, and we love the fact that entrants have embraced the site as a gallery of our region as much as a competition (with fantastic prizes each month I might add).

We broke the news of the passing of Diane Cilento to the world, and also broke through 8000 subscribers from all over the world - after all The Newsport is for people who care about our region regardless of where they live.

Still being a relatively new media source, we are proud of being recognised by Google News Alerts as a fully fledged news source, and on a personal note it's pleasing that we need to explain who we are and what we do less and less these days.

Finally, thanks for visiting The Newsport for your news everyday (well, we need our weekends too). We love the fact you've been moved to comment on our articles, and whether you're for or against whatever the topic might be, it's good to see we are still a passionate mob up here.

We look forward to delivering independent news to you when, where, and how you choose in 2012.

Anyway, we hope you enjoy this look back at 2011.

Merry Christmas and a prosperous new year.