Welcome to our special second anniversary edition of The National! We’ve been working hard on putting this together over a while, and we hope you enjoy it.

We’re pretty sure it’s the first time a Scottish newspaper has had a glossy magazine-style cover – one of many ‘firsts’ in a year in which we’ve pushed the boundaries of what a national newspaper can and should do. We have run a competition to design our front page (with two different winners), produced a pull-out section set in a parallel universe and torn up the entire paper and replaced it with a script for a 6pm television news show.

Where have these two years gone? This time last year, I’d just driven through to Portobello, only a couple of frantic weeks after stepping up to the role of editor, to pick up our birthday cake from Breadshare Community Bakery, and was looking back at our bewilderingly busy first 12 months. We celebrated, sure – but it felt like relief that we’d made it that far. Well done, we did it. We’re still here. This time, though, it feels a little different. This time, we’re looking ahead.

Before Richard Walker decided to gamble by launching this paper with no idea whether it could be a success, I was working across the office as a sportswriter at The Herald. The most exciting the job ever got would be a last-minute winner at Cappielow (sorry, Morton fans) and a trudge back to the train station in the rain. Now it’s Brexit and indyref2, elections and leadership campaigns, and trying to live up to being the newspaper you, the readers, demanded back when the Yes campaign was under-served by Scotland’s media.

Now, next time, we’ll be there. And make no mistake, The National will play a key role in the next stage of our movement. It’s our job from now until the starting gun is fired to keep up the momentum for the Yes side – and keep independence on the newsstands each and every morning. And with your support, we’ll do it.

But we’re not just about independence – in the last two years we’ve become Scotland’s alternative voice in the media on more than just the constitutional question. During the Tory party conference, where were the other newspapers when Theresa May and her colleagues were ramping up the anti-immigration rhetoric and stoking bigotry? They said: May makes her pitch for the centre ground’. We said: ‘Xenophobic, disgusting, repellent’.

We’ve introduced columns in Scots, and in Gaelic. We’ve recognised that in order to understand where we are now, we need to understand our past and have been publishing a weekly series on Scottish history.

A well-known Unionist commentator once said The National had the “worst list of columnists in newspaper history”. Well, we’re proud of the platform we’re providing for alternative voices like the Wee Ginger Dug, Cat Boyd, Vonny Moyes, Patrick Harvie, Mhairi Black and Carolyn Leckie amongst others.

And we’re not stopping there. We’ve just moved on to a new website – and we’re working on a few upgrades to it which should go live in the New Year. Our online shop is now available. The response to our merchandise has been incredible – who knew so many people would want cover up their British passport? The latest item we’ll have available is a special A2 poster version of the front page of this edition, featuring all of the nearly 600 front pages we’ve published since launch. Just visit www.thenational.scot/shop.

And we’ve got plenty more great stuff coming up. Next week, we’ll kick off our roadshow in Inverness on St Andrew’s Day with the Wee Ginger Dug (and his owner) in tow. We’ve always said The National is your newspaper – and now we’re bringing it to you. We’ve got dates in the New Year provisionally booked for Dunoon, Penicuik and Fort William … please get in touch at roadshow@thenational.scot if you’d like us to come visit you.

We’re also launching our new online Community project – creating a platform on our website and social media where readers can share their stories, publish their analyses of Scottish and UK politics and interact directly with The National’s team of writers and columnists.

There’s never been a more exciting time to be editor of a Scottish newspaper, and this one in particular.

We’ve got a fantasic team of journalists, and it really is a pleasure to work with the team to produce the paper you get dropped through your letter-box, pick up at the shop, open in your email inbox or click through on our website.

But don’t take us for granted. Scottish independence is now closer than it’s ever been. Scotland is being dragged into a hard Brexit it didn’t vote for and a new referendum Bill is on the table. Better Together’s promises have fallen one by one.

This time, we’re in a better position to fight for our better nation. Let’s work for it together.

TO SUPPORT THE NATIONAL AND SUBSCRIBE, PLEASE CLICK HERE