From the Newsroom: Changing our way of thinking

Wow!

Now let me emphasize that we are continuing to print and deliver a newspaper five days a week. We see a long future ahead for printed newspapers. Our Jan. 2 conversion to mail delivery has gone better than we had hoped, which I interpret as a sign there is still a lot of local interest in reading printed newspapers.

Print customers still provide the biggest portion of our circulation revenue. We need print, and are proud to provide it.

But we need to also think about everything we do, and why we do it that way. This week’s winter weather is an example.

On Monday afternoon there was some talk about snow on Tuesday, but the chances seemed very uncertain. So we resolved to keep an eye on the forecast. By Tuesday morning, the chances were snow would fall that night, so we wrote a story for our website. By midday, the odds had greatly improved, so we updated the story online.

We deliberately left the story out of the print edition, knowing that some readers wouldn’t get their paper until after the snow had melted. We only have a limited amount of space in print, so we thought we could better use it on a story that wasn’t out of date.

On Wednesday, the forecast called for more snow and the coldest weather so far this winter to come in over the weekend. That became both a web and print story for Thursday.

Really, this is the same type of thing the Sports team has been doing since we combined our Saturday and Sunday editions, and moved up our Friday night deadline. Rather than printing Friday night game stories on Tuesday, we post them online and add an extra page to our Saturday ePaper. For print-only readers, we list the league standings. And for all readers, we try to focus on stories about individual players, trends, and previews.

We’ll do the same sorts of things on the news side going forward.

Exploring recent history

I’d also like to see us write more stories about recent history, focusing on things readers remember. This is a trend we’re borrowing from other newspapers, where it has been a success. As a trial, I wrote three stories over the holidays to see if they would be well-read. I looked the other day to see the results.

All three of them did better than most of the local stories that appeared in the same weeks, or a story about the Willamette Meridian I wrote last Christmas. The biggest hit was a reader-suggested story about the history of an old sign along Northeast 72nd Avenue. A lot of people also looked at a Christmas Day story about famous people with ties to Clark County. And, back around Thanksgiving, a story about the former Totem Pole restaurant did OK, too.

None of these stories will win the Pulitzer Prize, but readers apparently enjoyed them. We want to do more analysis to see which stories readers enjoy online, and expand our offerings in those areas.

If you have a suggestion for a story, please use our Clark Asks portal, which you can see on our home page, www.columbian.com. We’re always on the lookout for a good story!