Why wait? New look for Gazette's mid-day email report

We've redesigned the daily newsletters delivered via email to those of you who want the updates. You will find a sleeker look and an easier time finding stories from Eastern Iowa that Gazette staff is gathering and sharing during the day.

The goal here is to get news and information from The Gazette and TheGazette.com to you on a timely basis, in a visual way that helps you sort and read that news on whatever electronic device you have at your fingertips.

The newsletter is sent at 1 p.m., in case you missed a look at TheGazette.com during the 11 a.m.-1 p.m. news "rush hour" that many people use to catch updates on the morning's news. The full report in this newsletter gives you news and sports headlines, obituaries, letters to the editor and other opinion pieces.

You can sign up for a customized report, based on your specific interests, if that suits you best. Categories are news, sports, the more-specific Iowa Hawkeye sports and obituaries. If you have suggestions for other topics, send a note to lyle.muller@thegazette.com, christoph.trappe@sourcemedia.net or both.

We know you are interested in things to do and also good deals. We can send you a reminder of a daily special deals program called Here's the Deal, which gives you discounts from sponsoring businesses. We also will keep you posted on other information you'd like to have that The Gazette provides, such as when area farmers' markets or garage sales are held.

If you are interested in the daily email go to this link.

How things have changed

Twenty years ago the digital age amounted to The Gazette offering an audio news service, through which you could call something called Cityline, and listen to one of our reporters or editors read you a short report of the latest news. You probably had a cord on your phone if you called Cityline. For a short time we also experimented with sending a noon newsletter on weekdays via fax machines. This was the era of that flimsy, waxy fax paper on which ink quickly faded. Heaven help you if you received a fax at the end of a roll of paper, and you had to flatten out the page.

Those efforts may seem archaic now but it was the `90s and, hey, we were in the digital age. They worked during their moment in time and we then moved on. GazetteOnline, which now is TheGazette.com, launched in the mid 1990s and has evolved continually over the years. Newsletters have emerged over the past few years. Mobile news is here, Twitter and Facebook are part of our information sharing process and you can be sure that more ways of getting you news and information are on the horizon.

Through all of the changes two things remain constant: people still expect reliable information from us and they want to be able to get that information in a way that makes sense, regardless of the delivery method.