Welcome to the New Year and welcome to the new Richmond News.
We warned you this would happen and here it is — a bigger, bolder weekly paper.
We’ve combined our two editions (Wednesday and Friday) into one, which will hit your doorsteps every Thursday.
The two-in-one paper will give us the space to explore new ideas, dive deeper into some old issues and bring a greater diversity of voices into the conversation about our community.
And it’s not like we haven’t done this before.
When the Richmond News and Richmond Review were undergoing ownership changes, the News reinvented itself as a weekly with the aim of providing a unique format with depth, colour and character. However, when the Review was closed a few months later, the News went back to two days a week to ensure readers stayed current with timely news — however, we never went completely “back.”
In fact, we maintained a number of the “weekly” characteristics in our Friday editions, with its front page news feature and letters in the first few pages of the paper. But the smaller page count and production demands of a twice-weekly limited what we could do.
Now that we are weekly (again), we can refocus on those qualities.
But not only are we going weekly, we’re also maintaining a daily presence — online.
We are significantly increasing our online content as well as our reach through social media. To make that happen, we’ve actually hired, no kidding, hired, (I’ve got to say that a few times, it’s so fun) two new reporters, whose job will be to write, source and edit stories that will keep you up to the minute with local news as well as interesting/fun, trending stories throughout the region.
I can’t tell you what a big deal it is for an editorial department to increase its staff – by two no less. We hear so much about layoffs and closures in the newspaper business, for us to be expanding is testament to our confidence in this formula, this team and our readers. This may be the digital age, but the appetite for news, insight and a range of thoughtful perspectives is as voracious as ever. The challenge for newspapers is finding the right platform, or platforms.
We think this is it.
To ignore the changing ways in which people consume their news would send us along the flight path of the dodo. But to be dismissive of our loyal print readership would get us there even faster.
These are exciting times — a little stressful, especially when you throw Christmas right ahead of our launch. But, truly, launching new ways to connect our community is a good problem to have.
And did I mention the two new hires?
