Editorial: And now for something completely different

When Monty Python’s John Cleese stepped in front of the camera to announce “And now for something completely different,” viewers knew they could expect something completely absurd was about to happen. We hope you will not see absurdity in what we are launching next week.

This week’s print edition is the final edition of The Morinville News in this format.

We learned from our printer early this year that the multi-million dollar press they were installing (which will print The Edmonton Journal, The St. Albert Gazette, The Morinville News and many other newspapers in the province) would provide us with increased print quality and sharper images. Exciting stuff for a news publication, but the downside was we would need to change the format of our publication. Because the press uses a larger roll of newsprint, we were given a choice of producing a magazine that was a half-inch smaller in length and width or a tabloid format that was the same height but a little wider.

After consultation with readers, advertisers and a local service group who gave me an opportunity to speak last minute at their breakfast meeting, we have opted to move to a wider format to give our advertisers more space to promote their products and services and to give us more room to bring you the news. The wider format will also allow us to be more creative with our layout and add some additional features and content people have said they would like to see. As an added bonus, there will be more colour as well.

Beyond positive comments about our Morinville-focused content, readers have always said liked that The Morinville News was a publication you could easily sit and read. That will not change. The new format publication will be a stapled publication with no free falling pages. It will be slightly wider but the same height readers have come to know.

Our dedication to doing all the things that have made us Morinville’s news choice will not change. In fact, like our size, they will widen and broaden.

But size and content are not the only things that will go wider. We will be expanding our distribution along with the change in format. Mail delivery to RR1, RR2 and Cardiff will commence with the changeover. Inside Morinville we will continue to distribute The Morinville News through our local businesses and our street boxes because the system has worked well for the publication, its readers and the businesses that have placed our display stands in their stores and restaurants.

For those of you who prefer to receive your Morinville News on a daily basis, we will continue our efforts to give you the news while it’s still news. Online we will be increasing our use of video to deliver the news, continuing to connect you to your community through social media, and we will be unveiling our 2013 edition of the Ask-A-Candidate series as soon as Nomination Day arrives and we see who the players are. This feature will allow residents to put forward candidate questions, which each candidate is free to answer on our website. We will also be hosting the 2013 All Candidates Forum on Oct. 15 at 7 p.m. at the Morinville Community Cultural Centre, continuing our tradition of being more than text and pictures on a screen or page.

Whether you are an online or an in print reader, we thank you and all our advertisers for your continued support. The news business is a tough business. We have recently seen Sun Media shuttering another dozen publications. We are grateful to be in a position of growth and will continue to manage that growth by baby steps so that we can continue to be here.

Although we are about to launch something completely different, we hope you will find we are very much the same where it counts – in our dedication to being Morinville’s community news choice.

-SD