Tim Rogers: Monday looking better

DALTON — Good morning.

If you didn’t see today’s front page story about changes we are making to the Monday paper, please read it. The headline is that starting tomorrow there will be a new look to it and a new name on it.

While this product will remain our Monday paper, we are converting it from our familiar broadsheet style to a magazine style tab and cramming it full of new features that we hope you will enjoy.

To reflect the change in look, we are calling our Monday paper, “DC Reader,” in hopes that it will be something that you will find useful for the entire week and that you will keep by your armchair until a new one is delivered the following Monday.

For all of you who are accustomed to starting your morning with us, don’t panic. DC Reader will still continue to bring you the same news, sports and advertising that you are accustomed to, but we hope that its new design will give a fresh look to our content and that you will find it easy to thumb through it.

The first question many of you will have is why change your format? The answer is two-fold.

First, Monday is traditionally one of our smallest papers — both for us and newspapers around the country — so changing it carries the least risk. We hope that the new format and content will produce a product that more people will want to buy without having to change any of the other days.

Second, because of Dalton’s unique position of having so many people working here but living in other counties where The Daily Citizen doesn’t circulate, we hope that the new look will help drive up single copy sales and introduce the paper to people who might not otherwise pick us up.

But this change involves a lot more than just giving the Monday paper a new wrapping.

The theme of the DC Reader is giving you news and information that you can use throughout the week, and this will start with each week’s cover story.

Each week we will either highlight an upcoming issue in the Dalton area or take you more in depth on something that we may have written about before but that is worthy of more coverage. We hope to avoid the same old, same old, and present you with fresh information that you can act on or that will serve as the basis for new community conversations.

A recent subscriber survey showed that many of our readers want us to do more local watchdog and enterprise journalism and this cover story will give us a chance to highlight those issues.

The second big change you will notice is to our local calendar of events. Each Monday paper will have a two-page calendar of both local and regional events that we hope you will be able to use to help plan your upcoming week. This new format will also be repeated in our Wednesday and Sunday papers and will give readers a greater number and variety of upcoming events and meetings.

The new calendar is also tied into our online calendar on Daltonnow.com and we are trying to make sure that items entered online will also appear in the daily paper and vice versa.

In addition to wanting more local enterprise reporting, the subscriber survey also showed that readers want more calendar items and community photos.

So, in addition to the new calendar format, each Monday we will feature two pages of community photos taken during the last week by our staff photographers. The pages will allow us to display photos that we didn’t have room for throughout the week and will also link to our online photo galleries where we have thousands of local photos for you to look at.

In keeping with our theme of helping you plan your week, we are moving the TV book from Sunday to Monday and publishing it in a larger format. We also have the new Charter TV channels in the book.

We hope the new TV book will be more readable and that many of you find it easier to use.

The last major change to the Monday paper is that we will have a business page featuring content from The Atlanta Business Chronicle. The Business Chronicle has agreed to let us use content from its website in our Monday paper and we think that will allow us to bring you business stories from across Georgia that will be of interest to our readers and that we hadn’t previously been able to publish.

We know that any time you change something it takes time for people to become comfortable with it. That is particularly true for a newspaper which comes into your home everyday.

We can’t promise you that we have gotten it totally right. We will likely make changes to it as we go along. So please keep those things in mind when it lands in your driveway tomorrow morning.

But most of all, we want to hear from you about what you like and dislike about it.

We hope, of course, that you enjoy it. Happy reading.

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