We expect our readers will be happy with what’s coming on The Hayride.

First of all, we have a new contributor. He’s Tom Bonnette, and he’s a recovering newspaperman. You might have noticed his first foray onto our bandwidth with his expose’ of the cranks, loons, stoners and crooks populating the Occupy NOLA protest last night; if you haven’t seen it you really ought to do yourself a favor and check it out.

Tom is an award-winning Louisiana journalist whose reporting, columns and editorial cartoons have appeared in publications that include The Houma Courier, The Alexandria Town Talk and The Franklin Sun.

Tom was actually taught the newspaper business at an early age by his grandfather, the late R.T. Bonnette of the Concordia Sentinel, and had the distinct honor ofhaving his first copy figuratively ripped to shreds by the legendary Sam Hanna Sr.

He has gotten better since then.

Tom is a Gulf War veteran, and he resides in Ferriday, where he was born and bred.  In case you didn’t know, Ferriday is also the home of Jerry Lee Lewis, Jimmy Swaggart and Mickey Gilley. And Tom carries on the proud Ferridaian tradition of walking on the outer limits of polite society.

In other words, he’ll fit in here just fine.

Tom will be doing a little more hard news on the site than most of our contributors will do, and as such you’ll see us breaking more stories. He’ll give us a bit more of an investigative presence, and broaden us out as a news source along with the commentary we’ve become known for.

He’s also a pretty talented cartoonist as well, so you’ll start to see that kind of thing through here.

And we’re going to start doing more video here. Tom already brings that – he’s got video from the Occupy NOLA goofballs on his piece that you’ve simply got to see – plus I’m finally going to get off my butt and do more of it. Making plans to get that done and by early next year we’ll be doing a lot more original footage on the site.

This week marks the two-year anniversary of the site. Our readers have carried us farther than we ever expected we’d be by now. So we’re going to start contributing a little more to growing ourselves even bigger in the next two years.

And you’ll start to see this move next week, when Tom begins blogging full-time here at the Hayride.

In the meantime, Happy Thanksgiving to everybody, and here’s to a first-class cochon de lait on Friday.