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The Honolulu Advertiser
Posted on: Sunday, January 11, 2009

COMMENTARY
An invitation to shape our future

By Jeanne Mariani-Belding

In a sign of the tough economic times, The Advertiser announced today some cutbacks and changes in content designed to better position the paper to weather the coming months ahead. Advertiser Editor Mark Platte describes some of those paperwide changes in his After Deadline column on Page B3.

Like other newspapers across the nation, we've seen a reduction in staff as well. Here on the editorial and opinion pages, that means we need to zero in on how we can most efficiently spend our limited time and resources to provide you with the best content possible. To help us do that, we've opted to eliminate our printed editorial page on Saturdays (we'll still have Saturday letters and other features online). That's because Saturday has among the lowest readership paperwide throughout the week, and this will give us more time to focus on enhancing our overall coverage, including the Sunday section.

That's where you come in.

Over the next couple of weeks, we'll be working on some changes -particularly in the Focus section -to bring you a greater diversity of voices and topics. We want to hear from you on which of our regular columns (David Shapiro, Garrison Keillor, Victor Davis Hanson, Ellen Goodman, Richard Halloran and Mark Platte) you enjoy, and which ones you can live without. Are you interested in more or less national and international coverage? Let us know what you think.

We're looking forward to making some positive changes to bring you more innovative and insightful coverage. And we'll continue to look for ways to enhance our online presence and build on our growing audience of younger readers.

More than any other section of the newspaper, the editorial and opinion pages are where you — our readers — have the greatest opportunity to be heard. Whether through letters or local commentaries, our pages are an important portal for community conversations, and we want to build on that.

Even in these difficult times of change, there's opportunity. For us, this is our opportunity to bring you a more evocative and interesting section. So tell us what you want to see. E-mail me at jmbelding@honoluluadvertiser.com or give me a call at 535-2445. I'd like to hear from you.

Jeanne Mariani-Belding is editor of The Advertiser's editorial and opinion section. Read her blog, The Hot Seat, at http://hotseat.honadvblogs.com.

Reach Jeanne Mariani-Belding at jmbelding@honoluluadvertiser.com.