This week’s story about Kestrel Aircraft Co. is another solid piece of reporting and writing by award-winning staff writer Emily Guerin. It’s also her final story for The Forecaster.

Emily was a freelance writer before she joined our staff, and it wasn’t easy to lure her into a staff position; she turned us down twice before finally agreeing to a full-time job about 15 months ago.

Emily is inquisitive, intelligent and sensitive – traits that help make her such a good journalist. But she is also a restless soul, and we knew she harbored a love of the outdoors and desire to live in the west. That’s where she’s headed now, to enjoy and explore places like Arizona, New Mexico and Colorado, and hopefully to write about issues as unique to those places as the people and towns she has covered here are to Maine.

We wish her the best, and we’ll miss her talent, dedication, leadership, compassion and most of all, her friendship.

But we’re also excited about her replacement, Matt Hongoltz-Hetling.

Matt joins us from one of our sister Sun Media Group papers, the Advertiser Democrat in Norway, where he was a reporter and assistant editor.

Before he gets totally immersed in all things Brunswick and Harpswell, Matt will be travelling to New York this week, where he and Advertiser Democrat Editor A.M. Sheehan will accept the national George Polk Award for Local Reporting from Long Island University for their stories last year about abysmal conditions in subsidized housing.

We didn’t get Matt on our first try, more than a year ago, either. But a Polk Award winner is definitely worth the wait.

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Mo Mehlsak is editor of The Forecaster. He can be reached at 781-3661 ext. 107 or mmehlsak@theforecaster.net. You can also follow Mo on Twitter: @mmehlsak.

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