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February 9, 2010

Tim Rogers: The Forum speaks

Good Morning.

I didn’t know that I looked like Jethro Bodine from “The Beverly Hillbillies.”

But according to one reader, the head shot that ran with my first few columns made me the spitting image of him.

During the last four days, I have been taking a tour of Dalton without even leaving my desk.

More accurately, you could call it a tour of how people in Dalton think and what issues are important to them.

If you wanted to break it down even farther, and some of you definitely would insist that I do so, you could call it a tour of a unique and special group of people in Whitfield County who chose to interact with The Daily Citizen every day.

Yes, that’s right, I am referring to those of you who call or e-mail our forum, many of whom do it on a regular basis.

In the more than six hours that I have spent since Saturday listening to each and every caller, I have learned things about the community that I doubt are discussed during the standard chamber tour of Dalton.

I have discovered what issues push your buttons the most and I love the fact that people here seem to be willing to give their opinion on virtually any subject.

What I have learned as well is that your ability to write and call us with your comments is much greater than our ability to get all of them in the paper.

I have listened to well over 500 comments on our forum line and I am still some three days behind. I promise that myself or someone else in the newsroom will listen to all of your comments and we will try to get as many of them as we can into The Forum’s regular spot on page 2A.

What I can do here is answer several of the most frequently asked questions that have been asked by readers over the last couple of weeks.

Here goes.

1) Are you going to change the forum or discontinue it? I have no intention of either changing or discontinuing The Forum. Numerous callers have told me it is one of the first things that they look for in the paper and it is one of our most popular features.

What I will ask of the callers and e-mailers is that you try to abide by some simple ground rules.

We don’t have a lot of room for each comment, so please make your point quickly and succinctly. Please stick to a topic and don’t veer off into a personal attack. If I didn’t know better, I would think that Idiot is the first name for many of our public officials. Even anonymous callers can be civil.

2) What happened to the former editor of the paper Jimmy Espy? Many of you have called in saying that you didn’t know that the paper had a new editor and wondered where the old editor had gone. Mr. Espy, whom I have not yet met, is working for the paper in Summerville and has also written for the Chattanooga Times Free Press.

3) Why don’t you run everything that is called in or e-mailed to you, and are you censoring some topics? Any topic is fair game as long as it is appropriate for a family newspaper. We try to run as many comments as we can, but to try and get us caught up I am using the best of some of the comments about certain subjects, such as the Jan. 29 snowstorm. I am sorry for that but if I don’t we will always be way behind. When we get caught up — if you ever allow us to — we will again be able to get more comments published in a timely manner. To give the forum some timeliness, I am taking recent forum comments that have been e-mailed to us and mixing them with the earlier comments.

So call away, send away and fire away. The Forum is your space, so use it well.

P.S. I have a new head shot.



Tim Rogers can be reached at 706-272-7735 or timrogers@daltoncitizen.com.

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