Avoid the icy sidewalks and roads with some good reading! Happy Sunday everyone and have a great week Great Falls.

The Atlantic: Free shipping isn’t really free

NPR: America will import more sugar this year than it has in four decades

Route Fifty: Cities increasingly enacting bans restricting homeless people, report says

CityLab: How locales are filling their expensive new jails

Strong Towns: Best of 2019, one line of your zoning code can make a world of difference

TIME: The Guardians of the Year: Public Servants

New York Times: The Year in Pictures

Smart Cities Dive: Disruptor of the Year: Sidewalk Labs

Foreign Policy: The global food crisis is here

Modern Farmer: Researchers say SNAP’s online grocery delivery poorly serves rural food deserts

New York Times: America’s dairy farmers are hurting. A giant merger could make things worse.

Poynter: Stop saying local news is dying

Society of Professional Journalists: Review of legal cases says much of ‘media policy’ censorship is illegal

Vox: Beware of the feel-good news story

As a local government reporter, I’ve used CityLab as a resource for years and am friends with some of their freelancers in real life. This news was disheartening to me on many levels. Journalism is a tough place to be these days, but it’s important, so please keep reading and supporting the people who do good work. We certainly appreciate it, and can’t survive without it:

Mother Jones: Bloomberg just bought CityLab-and put half its reporters out of a job

I call the 757 home, so this one’s partly just me sharing a little of my Virginia love, but also for the community branding discussion which is relevant to Great Falls:

The Virginian-Pilot: 757 selected as new name for Hampton Roads in regional rebranding effort