Questions, questions. Everybody has questions.

Kids have questions. “Where are my shoes?” No idea. See your mother. “Where is my PSP?” Probably in its case where it should be. Sadly, good sarcasm is lost on an 11-year-old and 9-year-old.

Even readers have questions. “Why didn’t I get my paper?” Great question. Difficult answer. A little bit of background is needed.

The Mirror is a voluntary paid publication with an emphasis toward total market penetration.

Voluntary paid means that we have subscription rates much like a typical daily newspaper or magazine does, but you don’t have to subscribe to receive a paper. It only guarantees that as a paid subscriber, you will receive every edition of your paper.

After that, it gets a little more complicated. As I said, we emphasize total market penetration for the remainder of our non-paid deliveries. This means that we try to deliver to households in the Federal Way market. We define our delivery market by the Federal Way schools.

So as a general rule, if you live in a house where your kids would be placed in a Federal Way school, you are on our delivery routes for home delivery.

However, these non-paid deliveries are usually in a state of flux.

We change routes based on geographical considerations such as streets under lengthy repair, streets that don’t go through to adjoining streets (very popular around here) and other issues such as length of delivery time, congestion of major thoroughfares and hill impediments as we get closer to the water.

We also look at social issues such as the Northeast Tacoma area that doesn’t go to the Federal Way school system, but identifies more with Federal Way than Tacoma. These factors solve most of the problems unless we make changes.

Lately, we have been experimenting with some changes. We identified a number of new developments in Federal Way that were never added to our existing routes, so we are phasing these in.

To do so, we moved some of our home delivery from our outer fringe markets to these core Federal Way developments.

As your local community newspaper, we strive to be the best newspaper for Federal Way. As a result, we strive to get it in your hands as the members, leaders and businesses with whom The Mirror is most relevant.

Keep me informed if we are not meeting this goal.

Oh, and a subscription rate is $26 for one year. Anybody want a subscription?

Mirror publisher Rudi Alcott can be reached at ralcott@fedwaymirror.com or (253) 925-5565.