By Andrew WestDOVER — Sports fans, we thank you for calling our hotline and sending emails.
It is clear that many of you turn to these pages regularly, often first thing, every day.
Our change to a five-day print schedule of the Delaware State News means we need to adjust some areas of content.
First, our sports readers have said they enjoy two daily staples: television listings and local schedules.
On Fridays and Sundays, we will give you two days’ worth.
During playoff seasons in particular, this will help you readily find the times and channels of interest.
And with something like NASCAR, it can be especially helpful. None of us can tell you which station is carrying the race from week to week.
This falls in line with one of our key approaches to content — and that applies to sports, entertainment and more. We should tell people in advance about what they may enjoy, rather than telling them later what they missed.
Next-day coverage of sports, local and national, will require some changes in reader habit.
That is where our website, BaytoBayNews.com, comes into play.
We will update scores and more each night. Friday night football games will be reported on the website first and then packaged nicely in our Sunday edition.
One of the greatest challenges we have had for years is working on the Friday night deadlines. Consider that there is about an hour-and-a-half available after the games to write stories and headlines, compile scores, select photos and design the sports pages.
We will do our best to handle some high-profile national sports in the same manner.
Not surprisingly, many of our readers are NASCAR fans who enjoy reading race summaries on Monday mornings. NFL fans, likewise, have such expectations. We can post those to the website and include in print in Tuesday editions.
A greater question we would like readers to answer is what sports news and information you would like to read in advance of games or races. In recent years, we learned that readers love the short NFL game previews.
We often find that reader interest in local sports builds best when people know more about the teams and athletes.
Along those lines, tell us what you would like to read.
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To review our upcoming changes, we will discontinue print editions on Saturdays and Mondays.
And we will begin printing pages that are about 3 inches shorter. This will allow us to print more color pages each day.
The changes are effective July 1.
Readers should note that subscription rates will not change. Holding to the current rate while reducing the costs of printing and delivery will allow us to continue our commitment to local journalism.
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Some of you may have read about national newspaper chain Gannett’s decision to cut back on opinion pages. Editors of those papers will decide how often to publish opinions, but the corporate “suggestion” is to reduce opinion pages to just a few days a week.
Readers of the chain’s newspapers are worried what a lack of commentary may mean in their communities. For the most part, these newspapers will no longer carry “editorials” — the institutional voice of their editorial boards.
One of the reasons behind it is that they found their readers did not like to be lectured or told what to think.
Does that last part sound familiar? The Delaware State News — and its sister Independent Newsmedia Inc. publications — for more than 30 years has been free of such institutional editorials and has offered its Opinion page space to its readers.
The Delaware State News believes its Opinion pages belong to our readers. Our role is to facilitate the community’s discussion of public issues and stay within the bounds of our civility checklist.
Our guidelines offer the following:
We have faith in the public’s ability to eventually make good decisions if we provide them a solid understanding of the issues and a place to debate and develop their opinions.
When a newspaper takes editorial stances, its reputation for purposeful neutrality is jeopardized, and its news coverage, however evenhanded, becomes suspect.
We believe our resources are better spent giving people the information they need to make their own intelligent decisions about important public issues.
Starting July, our plan is to have two Opinion pages each day and four on Sunday.
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We greatly appreciate our readers’ feedback.
If you have questions or comments, we encourage you to contact us.
Call the DSN Hotline at 302-608-0062 to leave a comment or question. Or you can email us at dsnhotline@iniusa.org.
Andrew West is executive editor of the Delaware State News.
