The Editor's Desk

Monday’s paper might have looked a bit strange to some of our readers. Pages are misnumbered and certain features aren’t where you expect. There was a small technical glitch in the production process that caused the middle four pages of each section to run out of order. It’s being dealt with.

I didn’t blog that much in April or even write as many editorials as usual. I apologize, but there are two contributing circumstances. First, April has been a month for vacations (I just came back from Seattle myself) and whenever somebody is absent from the newsroom, we all have to fill in, given our small size, and it leaves me with little free time to work on commentary.

But the second, bigger reason is that we’re working on a redesign and a rethinking of the presentation of the Desert Dispatch. We’ve actually been planning it out for two years, and many Barstow residents have been consulted and shown some prototypes of what we’re considering.

Sadly, due to logistical issues, we aren’t able to make the most dramatic change we considered — turning the Desert Dispatch into a compact magazine-sized publication. We got very good feedback from the prototype, even from Barstow residents who tended toward more traditional attitudes about newspapers. It’s a concept we will revisit in the future if we can.

While we will be staying the same general format, we will be doing a lot of work on how we present stories. One of the messages we got from readers in our presentations last year was that, essentially, people getting the information they need easily was more important than any particular “style” of reporting. On more than one occasion, we had readers ask us why “Information Detail X” had not been published in the newspaper. Actually, I knew that “Information Detail X” had, in fact, been in our newspaper. But I knew that these details they couldn’t find were often buried in larger stories about meetings and projects. This meant these readers were not reading whole stories. There were bits and pieces of the story that mattered to them, but they didn’t care about or didn’t have time for all the bells and whistles.

So we’re looking at ways to pull out important details to make them more visible to our readers. You may have noticed some initial efforts in this matter over the last year as we strive to put more information “boxes” in our stories, pulling out important information and making it more visible for folks who don’t have time to read full stories.

We’re expecting to launch the redesign in June, and we’ll have more details as we formalize the changes.