The news is impossible to predict.

And that led to some pretty lively discussions in the Review newsroom over the past several weeks as we wrapped up our review of 2013 and began to look ahead to the stories that will shape life on Bainbridge Island in the coming year.

On today’s front page, we picked four stories to represent the wide range of issues we’ll be covering as news in the new year.

All of them, of course, have roots that extend into the year that’s just gone by.

Likewise, we found our newsroom debates over “stories to watch” in the coming year returning time and again to stories that started to sprout in 2013.

There will be follow-ups, we’re sure, to many of the stories that broke in 2013, or have even longer histories.

The update to the Comprehensive Plan is one, as Bainbridge Island will grapple with revising its guide to growth. The proposed Visconsi development — another 2013 story that will linger on in the coming year — has underscored concerns that the vision of the current comp plan has not adequately informed the city’s current development regulations and zoning. If the recent history of the rewrite of the Shoreline Master Program is any indication, we should expect an intense debate over the comp plan among concerned islanders.

There will be other stories from 2013 that continue to unfold this year: the pending makeover of Waterfront Park; additional improvements within the police department; the sorting out of the relationship between the fire department and the Bainbridge Island Ambulance Association; renewed levy funding for schools and the fire department; the ongoing public records lawsuit against the city; a new off-leash dog park; the Wyckoff superfund site cleanup; and so on.

But this being Bainbridge, we’ve come to learn what other islanders figured out long ago: Expect the unexpected.