We have some changes coming.
Starting Sunday, you will see some new things in the Herald-Leader. These changes have been designed with you in mind, and we hope you’ll let us know what you think about them. Here’s what’s in store:
• In Sunday’s paper, you will notice a slimmer TV Book. We have added programming highlights for the week and put each day’s schedule on facing pages. The same number of channels is listed. Because much of the night-owl programming was paid or repetitious, those grids have been condensed into a highlights list. You can always access complete TV listings on our Web site, www.kentucky.com. To tell us what you think about the TV Book, please contact Angela Allen at 859-231-3214 or aallen1@herald-leader.com.
• Soon, we will change the content on page A2 to invite you to interact with us more. We will run excerpts from the many blogs we offer at www.kentucky.com – from Sharon Thompson’s “Flavors of Kentucky” about food to Mike Fields’ “Fields Notes” about high school sports – and invite you to comment online. On Mondays, we will bring back the popular “Ask Us” column, in which you ask us questions about what’s going on around town, and we try to get you answers. We will invite you to submit your own photos for publication as the “1,000 Words” photo of the day. And we’ll return the “Pop” column of celebrity news to the second page of the paper.
• We have been running a comics survey this summer, asking you to vote for your favorite and not-so-favorite comics. The results are in, and we’re considering changes in the comics lineup. Some of the less popular strips will be dropped, and we will add some of the more popular newcomers that we auditioned this summer. We thank the more than 4,000 of you who participated in our survey to help us with those decisions.
• Starting Tuesday, we will change our presentation of stock market news. Since stock and mutual fund prices are readily available on our Web site, www.kentucky.com, and others, the traditional stock and mutual fund tables will be limited. Instead, we will offer a look at what the markets might do next and which stocks and industries are making news, as well as a summary of interest rates. We invite you to comment on these changes by contacting Linda Niemi at 859-231-1673 or lniemi@herald-leader.com.
Some, especially those without computer savvy, may not like these changes, particularly those in the stock tables. Newspapers have been carrying stock tables since 1835, but print is no longer the best format for such listings. Online, you can search and customize listings, as well as get current prices during the trading day.
As more listings, such as stocks and TV programming, gravitate online, we and other newspapers will be carrying less of them in print. A study this year by the Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism found that “barely one out of 20 papers in the country now print two full pages or more of stock market and other financial tables.” That was what we were doing in the Herald-Leader until now. About a third of U.S. newspapers print no financial tables.
As newspapers and other media companies cope with challenging financial times, we must allocate resources, such as newsprint, toward content that is unique – preferably local – and well-suited to the format.
Whether you love or loathe what we’ve done, we look forward to hearing from and learning from you. Please contact me or my colleagues listed above with your thoughts on the Herald-Leader and www.kentucky.com. Thanks for reading and for caring about what we do.
Linda Austin
Editor
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