Otterblog

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More soccer. More NASCAR. Less NASCAR. Smaller pictures. More politics. More news about the region. Less news about the region. And get rid of F-minus (only a week to go there...)

That is two days of telephone calls with my most important constituency: readers. You all are a demanding bunch, and you have a right to be. I think it amazes people that they can pick up the phone and speak to somebody who is more or less in charge of news coverage. My experience tells me that readers want to vent, that they feel a sense of ownership in the paper and that they take changes to their paper personally.

All of that is great, and I mean it. The difficulty comes in aligning people’s recollections of what the newspaper was with what it has to be to reflect today’s realities (both financial and cultural). As somebody who has been here for nearly 20 years, I’ve seen a big shift in what we do and where we put our resources. We used to have one graphic artist. Now, we have four. So, the look of our paper is better. There’s an argument to be made that those four bodies could be better used as reporters, as gatherers. But that’s not as neat and tidy as people suggest. Our paper looks better today. It has more pop, thanks in large part to our artists, and I have to think that a better-presented paper is a better-read paper.

We still have pretty exemplary arts coverage in our Sunday paper, but to my mind, the best art Sunday was a photo on the Local section of a BBQ cooker made out of a mailbox (see above link). Talk about your special delivery. I am always amazed at the creativity of the cooking class. If you have an interesting cooker, send me a photo.