Please take a few minutes on Sunday to read the farewell column by John Sias, our reader advocate, which will appear in print on the front of the Perspectives section and online under "Opinions."

John served as The Telegraph’s reader advocate for the past three years and is stepping down from that post so he can devote more time to a new challenge: serving as president of the New Hampshire Prostate Cancer Coalition.

The reader advocate position was created by my predecessor Dave Solomon in May 2003 to serve as an independent voice for our readers. As such, readers could bring any concerns or criticisms directly to him — fairness, bias, etc. — which he would investigate or comment on in his monthly column.

In order to maintain that independence, John was not an employee of The Telegraph, which is just the way he liked it. Here’s an excerpt from Sunday’s column on that very subject:

"Almost all ombudsmen are employees of their paper, but that’s not the situation here in Nashua. I wanted to be free of oversight, free of being fired for something I might say that was critical of the paper. Fortunately, the paper saw it this way, too, so I became the outsider, the hired gun who could "tell it like it is" without fear of his column being changed or eliminated."

I would like to publicly thank John for his valuable service and wish him well on his new project. We are now in the process of seeking a replacement and hope to have a new reader advocate on board in the not-to-distant future.

If anyone would like to wish him well directly, John can be reached at JNSias@aol.com.