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September 21, 2005
Content
“Tempers flared over skyboxes, unity emerged with a Poynter quote-out, and one editor said the new color gray made him want to eat fish.”
In a playful e-mail, Deputy City Editor Danielle Kronk suggested that this might be the first sentence of the story if a reporter were covering a meeting we had today at the Monitor. I won’t bore you by explaining what it means. The point is that today a group of editors and designers continued their arguments about the minutiae of what the Monitor will look like in a few weeks when we introduce our new typography.
When passions cool over these issues and the decisions are made, we’ll share them with you.
In the meantime, I’d like to call your attention to work already under way on the content of the paper. It was a content review, after all, that started us down the road to redesigning the paper.
I’ll focus on two areas: community news and opinion.
We publish community news inside the Local/State section. The challenge is to make this feature even more vital and informative.
Rebecca Tsaros-Dickson, the new community editor, has already begun to report more fully on certain items and to expand on what we publish. A former reporter, she is taking a proactive approach, seeking out news rather than just publishing what people send us. Becky would love to work with correspondents from local high schools, for example, to get more school news on the pages – especially news with names and faces.
We’ve also retained our Town Criers, community volunteers who write for the Sunday paper. There are towns without criers, incidentally, and we would like to remedy that.
Now, about opinion. It has always been the goal of our editorial pages to be a community forum. We have opinions, and we put them in editorials, but these take up just a fraction of the space. We want to increase dramatically the number of voices who use our opinion pages to discuss the issues of our state and communities.
Opinion Editor Ari Richter has joined Editorial Page Editor Ralph Jimenez to develop a broader forum. Among other things, this entails e-mail interviews with newsmakers and pro-con presentations on issues. It includes excerpts from speeches and public testimony. It means soliciting more public response on major events as they happen.
People around here have never been shy about sharing their opinions. The result is a rich public debate. One goal of our redesign is to stir up even more of it on the Monitor’s editorial pages.
Please stay tuned!
Posted by Mike Pride at September 21, 2005 05:53 PM