The Editor's Desk

You may have noticed an unusual advertisement on A7 in today’s Desert Dispatch (Monday, Sept. 8), written by me.

All week long we’ll be running special ads detailing some of the changes ahead when the new Desert Dispatch launches on Monday, Sept. 15. This first advertisement is a bit of an overview explaining what we’re doing and why.

Keep an eye for the ads throughout the week so that next Monday doesn’t come as quite a shock.

A heads up for those who are interested: Opinion commentary writer Barry Gadbois is at the Democratic National Convention. He’s blogging about the event while he’s there. You can read up on his experiences here in our community blogging service.

My staff is cheating!

You may or may not have noticed some slight changes to the way the current Desert Dispatch looks. As we’ve been putting together the various elements and features that we’ll be using in the redesigned newspaper, they’ve been quietly showing up in the current version. A couple of new items — a stat file display and a “Did you know?” box — were used in Saturday’s paper.

We’ve started practicing designing the new pages to see how much work it will be once the redesign launches in July.

Just to make things clear, though, the redesign is actually fairly modest. We’re not really changing our content that much. We hope to make it easier to find important information and details in the way we present the news so that busy readers can quickly get what they need.

“ASSEMBLYMAN COOK’S CAPITOL PUNISHMENT BILL PASSES FULL ASSEMBLY”

It’s about time we got some capitol punishment up there in Sacramento.

This week marks one year since we started blogging at the Desert Dispatch. This blog in particular has 83 posts (not counting this one), and I’m looking to increase that frequency of posting over the next year.

Unfortunately, Barstow doesn’t seem to be much of a blogging town as yet. There are a few out there, but not many. I’ll attribute the loss to the fact that we tend to lose population of folks between the ages of 20 to 40, which apparently are prime blogging years. As much as a new medium can have a formal demographic as yet.

But anyway, as a reminder, if you want to join the blogging party, we host reader blogs through the “Publish Your Stuff” feature on the home page.

Yesterday, editors of Freedom Communications newspapers had several seminars regarding the future of our Web sites and newspapers (more are happening today).

One of the major focuses yesterday was on information databases for our sites, something we’ve wanted to do here at the Desert Dispatch, but lacked the tools and staff. For example, we held off posting our police logs in the way we posted typical stories, because we wanted to figure out a way to present them in a map format, the way a lot of larger newspaper sites do. Lacking the tools to do so, we decided to just go ahead and post them online anyway to fulfill readers’ needs.

Fortunately, our friends at our larger Freedom publications are working on tools to help us more easily build and develop our own databases to help Barstow residents find local information. In the future, expect to see more resources on our site to help you track down important local information.

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.