SARATOGA SPRINGS – Saratoga TODAY Newspaper and SaratogaMama are teaming up in 2013 to provide Saratoga County with a new resource for parents raising children. According to Saratoga TODAY owner, Chad Beatty, the newspaper has acquired an ownership stake in the website SaratogaMama.com. As a result of the partnership, Saratoga TODAY announced a new quarterly print publication titled SaratogaMama Magazine, which will debut at the end of February.

It has been quite a year here in Saratoga Springs. As such, it’s been a wild 12 months around the Saratoga TODAY offices. As the city lives and breathes, so too does its dedicated weekly newspaper that publishes every Friday morning. What we as a newspaper hope to do is serve the community by providing interesting and original content while introducing our readers to the unique people and places in the Spa City. We’d like to take a moment to acknowledge some of our more popular and impactful stories of 2012. While some of these writers have moved on professionally, we were proud to feature their contributions week in and week out. We hope you’ll reminisce with us before we turn the page to a new chapter in the history of Saratoga TODAY. These stories were selected based on a combination of reader response, web traffic and staff suggestions, and are presented in no particular order. If you’d like to read any of these stories in their entirety, visit www.saratogatodaynewspaper.com.

WILTON – The town clerk – the go-to person in any municipality. Need a dog license? How about a marriage license? Want the minutes from a board meeting, a copy of a local law, or want to know the best back roads to get around heavy holiday traffic? Have a question about a birth certificate, need a handicap parking sticker, want to pay your property taxes? Town clerks are the ones who pretty much keep the town running. They’re the go-to person.

SARATOGA SPRINGS - Before a nonprofit program called Music & Memory donated iPods to his nursing home, Henry, who had been suffering from dementia for a decade, rarely spoke or made eye contact with others. One day, his caretakers put headphones on his ears to play songs from his youth, and suddenly everything changed.

When the news first broke last week about the stunning and horrific scene unfolding in Newtown, Connecticut, I did what I always do. I jumped on Twitter.

SARATOGA SPRINGS – If you ask local historian and author Hollis Palmer, he’d tell you Christmas came early for the city of Saratoga Springs’ History Museum located in the Canfield Casino at Congress Park.

WILTON – With 118 zoning changes looming on the horizon and a sweeping change of the current Ethics Board, Wilton town residents showed up in force at last week’s town board meeting, arguing the town council and the zoning review committee locked them out of the process and gave town residents no voice in the changes. Residents accused the board and the committee of supplying little, if no information to the public, and of asking only local business owners who had something to gain from the changes for their help in the revisions of the existing comprehensive plan.

SARATOGA SPRINGS – It is a win/win situation for local entrepreneurs Melissa Paquet and Mark Straus.