How do you use our Business Leads?

Duane Johnson is one of my heroes, and we need your help to make sure that his skills are used in the best possible way.

Duane is a reporter here at Northern Nevada Business Weekly, and his often thankless job is gathering all the information we publish in our Business Leads section.

It's a heck of a lot of work.

We want to be sure, however, that you find Duane's work useful.

If it's not, then we'll find better ways to use his skills and our precious space in the newspaper.

I hope you will drop me an e-mail info@nnbw.biz is the address and let me know which portions of our Business Leads section you find useful or interesting.

If you don't use any of the Business Leads, I would be interested in hearing that, too.

Here are the primary types of information we publish in the Business Leads:

* New businesses: This is gathered from sources such as business licenses, fictitious business name filings and applications for state contractor licenses.

* Building permits.

* Bankruptcies, mechanics liens and tax liens.

* Construction jobs that are going to bid.

(This information is gathered by Nevada Blue and graciously shared by the company with our readers.)

* New corporate filings including corporations, limited liability corporations and the like with the state.

A number of readers have noted that these new corporations often list a professional registered agent as their address in the state and have wondered if we could get the address of the company, rather than the registered agent.

We haven't been able to figure out how to do this, largely because Nevada law provides a lot of privacy to people who create new corporations.

Because of that, we're particularly curious whether you find those new corporate filings useful as business leads.

We want this to be a newspaper you find useful, and I figure the best way to learn your desires is to ask you.

Please take a minute and let us know how you use the Business Leads section.

John Seelmeyer is managing editor of Northern Nevada Business Weekly.