We’ve asked for the patience and perseverance of readers in the past few weeks as we revised some sections of the Skagit Valley Herald to make better use of our local content. After some tweaking, we think we’ve got it right.
Beginning today, content from the People section, which has been appearing on Mondays, will move to the Skagit Living section of Sunday’s paper. The People pages have always been about acknowledging local achievement, and we believe it is fitting to include that personal approach in Skagit Living along with other features that celebrate our community, its people and their accomplishments.
With the addition of People, Skagit Living will be more loaded than ever with local information and community highlights, plus other popular offerings. They include:
• Celebrations, a longtime feature that chronicles milestones in local people’s lives. It was recently moved to the Monday paper (an unpopular move, it turns out) and will now return to Sunday’s Skagit Living section.
• Scrapbook.
• School honors.
• Letters of Thanks.
• Military briefs.
• Fundraisers.
• Volunteer opportunities.
• Club meetings.
• Workshops.
• Travel.
• Books.
• Reunions.
• Pet column (bi-monthly).
• Cops Corner (monthly).
• Dear Abby.
• Dr. Peter H. Gott.
• The New York Times Crossword Puzzle.
• Alder on Bridge.
Stories of local interest, and the strong photography and graphic design that accompany them, will continue to be featured on the front cover of the Skagit Living section. It’s our opportunity to spotlight stories unique to Skagit County.
The Sunday paper is, we believe, the best place to bring all this important local coverage together in one issue. Adding features to Skagit Living means it will typically be at least a couple of pages larger than it is now.
Because the material from the People pages will move to Sunday, we can return the Monday Sports coverage to the front page of that section.
Education notes will appear in the Monday paper, where they have typically been published for the past several years.
Beginning next week, we will introduce a new cartoon panel to the daily and Sunday comics pages. Pearls Before Swine, which generated an overwhelmingly positive response during a recent test run, replaces For Better or Worse. The creator of that strip will no longer be doing exclusively new material, and the distributors have indicated that it will include older strips.
It’s always dangerous to mess around with the funny pages, but our choice is to put something new and fresh in front of our readers.
We know that these adjustments will take a bit of getting used to, but we know from experience that our readers adapt quickly. The important thing from our point of view is that none of the locally generated coverage we pride ourselves in is disappearing from the newspaper.
We’re not planning other big changes any time soon, and thank you for sticking with us while we made these adjustments. Your feedback helped guide us, and we hope you will keep it coming.
• Don Nelson is editor of the Skagit Valley Herald. He can be reached at 360-416-2137 or by e-mail at .
