Readers comment on national weather, print size

Many of you comment about The Gazette at our request when paying your subscription. Today, some responses:

I hear that comment more than any other from long-time Gazette readers who became accustomed to the national weather map during their years of loyalty to the paper, before we dropped the map and national world temperature readings in March.

We dropped the feature because our experience has been that most readers get national and world weather elsewhere, notably the Web but the Weather Channel. Moreover, sometimes the national and world weather information we receive is revised after we commit it to print. When that happens we have information that, thanks to the other sources, easily is noticeable.

Even so dropping the feature was no easy decision, but we did it to maintain room for local news.

See the notes above about people's interested in weather. We appreciate your interest in the news but advertising also is part of the reason people buy the paper, plus it provides most of the paper's financial support.

Front page ads are a growing trend. Newsroom types were leery about them at first, arguing that they would detract from the news. But the fit seems to work, as it does on other pages.

One financial problem facing newspapers is that they have fewer ads than in previous years, the result of increasing avenues for advertisers, especially as those advertisers deal with a tough economy. Going back to the good old days means going back to page after page full of department store ads in the paper's front section. By the way, we'd be for that, as it would support more news pages.

Less exists in some areas but we actually have more local news than we did before. We've been up front about dropping items such as the celebrity briefs, Minipage and, of course, national and world weather. By making the moves, however, we have freed up more than space than was devoted at the beginning of this year for local news. The news is not in a separately labeled Iowa Today section, but in the front section.

We haven't, with the exception of the comics page. Some folks have worried that we reduced the type size on our news pages when we trimmed the size of the newspaper's pages but we did not.

We have pushed the local news to the front section because that is what readers tell us they want from us most. Many of our readers know the nation and world news when they pick up the paper in morning because they have followed it the day before on television. Others follow it online.

We still put leading world and nation news on the front page. I'd argue that placing the nation, world and business news in the B section, which leads with sports but is not the sports section, just like the C section that leads with features but includes classified ads is not the Accent section, does not cheapen the value of that news. Every page of The Gazette has value, including the pages we've dedicated to world and national news.

Having written that, we are reviewing the placement of all of our news. If we make any changes I will write about them.

Does not.