It's called a newspaper because it is a printed product with news in it - stories about the community and the world outside of the community that local residents should know about.
A newspaper, of course, is more than that. It's the other little things that matter to many readers.
For some, reading the news is the first cup of coffee of the day. The second cup of coffee, however, is devoted to the horoscopes, the comics and the puzzles.
This week, we made changes to that part of the paper and some of our longtime readers (thank you for supporting The Citizen and reading it for as many years as you all have) aren't happy. Your criticisms haven't fallen on deaf ears. Like The Citizen always has and always will, we hear you and we'll make the changes we can.
For the folks who miss Pickles and Diamond Lil, they were (and are) great newspaper comics. We pulled them (and the others) because they came from an American provider that kept raising their rates and demanded to be paid in U.S. dollars. Our new lineup of comics comes from a single Canadian provider (TorStar, the syndication business operated by the Toronto Star newspaper), rather than the multiple American providers we previously had.
Yes, most of the comics and puzzles, as well as the horoscopes comes from an American source, but TorStar holds the exclusive rights to them. For those who have suggested that The Citizen pick up For Better Or Worse, Canadian Lynn Johnston's classic newspaper comic, we'd love to... but her distributor is one of the American companies we let go and that company charged a premium for Johnston's comic, which is why we weren't carrying it in the first place.
By switching to TorStar as our exclusive provider (and we did ask one of the American providers to tender a bid - they weren't even close in cost), the annual savings will be in the thousands of dollars and TorStar sends it to us as one finished document of comics and puzzles, eliminating the need for multiple downloads, followed by time-consuming assembly of those items onto the printed page.
Like every other business, if there's a way we can save money and increase productivity at the same time, we're on it.
But it shouldn't come at the expense of customer satisfaction, of course.
Yes, the horoscopes this week have been too small. We've let TorStar know and it will be bigger next week.
We've also proposed some changes to the comics page that will decrease the size of the crossword, the cryptoquote puzzle and the Word Sleuth (yes, it's not the familiar WonderWord but it's what TorStar offers) to beef up the size of the Sudoku puzzle. We're hopeful TorStar can make that fix in time for next week but we ask for your patience as they work ahead a week or more at a time.
For the crossword fans, we're confident you'll be impressed with the super-sized Canadian crossword that will debut this Saturday.
We're also confident you'll let us know what you think of it.
We really do appreciate all of the phone calls and emails, both complaining and praising what we do. It means you care about your newspaper and what's in it. We're thankful every day for that level of engagement.
-- Editor-in-chief Neil Godbout
Note: Due to a technical mistake on our end, we accidentally repeated Thursday's comics and puzzles in Friday's print edition. In Saturday's print edition of The Citizen, we'll have both Friday and Saturday's comics and puzzles, along with the weekend comics and special Canadian crossword.
