From the Newsroom: Getting ready for launch day

OK, now that the front page is decided, let’s move inside the paper. As I explained last month, our main news section, Section A, will actually be printed in two sections because it will be beyond the capacity of our press. You’ll find a lot more in-depth national and international news here, plus our opinion pages.

The B Section will include sports and weather, and our new Outdoors page, which will contain both local and regional content. (We know our readers enjoy hiking in Central Oregon, too.)

In the C Section, we expect to give readers more local news. The amount of local news varies day to day, depending on what’s happening and who is available to write about it, but our goal is to fill the entire section with local, regional and neighborhood news, plus obituaries.

We have something new in the D Section, Life, that I didn’t tell you about last time. We’re adding a local history page, including a reproduction of a historical Columbian front page. Below it, you’ll usually find Martin Middlewood’s local history column. We can’t promise to always put the two together, however, because over the years we changed the width of our front page several times, so some of the historical covers take up more room than others.

We’ve already got a list of dozens of covers that we are eager to present to you. Most all of them are of dates that are important in history, be it worldwide, national or local. I’ve only seen one mock-up, but I think the reproduction will be large enough for you to read the headlines and see the photos. If you’re intrigued, or want to see another date, our archive is online in a searchable database at newspapers.com. A subscription is required to search the database.

Finally, our new E Section will focus on home improvement and gardening. We expect a mix of local, regional and national content. In addition, it will contain the “back of book” stuff that was found in our Saturday Life section, such as daily comics, puzzle, advice and the TV grids. (Sunday comics will be included in the Weekend Edition in the same standalone section you now receive on Sundays.)

I think our new Weekend Edition will be a good read. And most importantly, by delivering it on Saturdays, it will reach virtually all of our home delivery customers, including those who receive their newspaper via the U.S. Postal Service.

A new Standard

Byline watchers have probably noticed a new source of state news in The Columbian. The new Washington State Standard offers its journalism for free to all readers, and allows newspapers like The Columbian to reprint it under certain conditions. We sometimes use content from its sister site, the Oregon Capital Chronicle, too.

Both sites are part of States Newsroom, a national organization that aims to plug some of the gaps in state capital reporting that have been left by a greatly diminished press corps. States Newsroom is funded entirely by philanthropic contributions and does not accept money from corporations.

Editor Bill Lucia and two veteran Olympia news reporters, Jerry Cornfield and Laurel Demkovich, form the core of the Standard’s team, with a third reporter due this summer. So far, the content has been excellent, and we are pleased to offer it to Columbian readers.