We’re proud of the print edition of The N’West Iowa REVIEW and hope that you enjoy it as much as we love producing it for you. Our company has gained a bit of a reputation for being cutting edge and we’re proud to say that in the last 35 years we’ve made strides in publishing that have helped changed the face of community journalism.
So, it’s baffled some of our readers — and fellow publishers — that we haven’t found a home on the World Wide Web. Everybody has a web site these days. And nearly everyone, from Grandma to pre-schoolers, seems to know their way around a computer keyboard.
Our reasoning has been consistent: our customers, both our subscribers and our advertisers, invest in our newspaper by doing business with us. They make it possible for us to maintain the largest staff of reporters and photographers of any weekly newspaper in the state. They allow us to run striking color photographs and to send our journalists around the region to cover events of interest and importance. When we produce a compelling issue, you spend extra time with the newspaper. That increases the chances that you’ll notice the notices that our advertisers place in the newspaper. And that maximizes their investment.
It’s a fairly straight-forward business model. But it would be damaged if we began offering our stories on-line for free. Our more tech savvy subscribers wouldn’t have to pay for our print edition. Our advertisers wouldn’t reap the benefits of their display advertising.
In the past five years, various newspapers have tested different models to try to solve some of those problems. Several publications offer on-line editions that are only accessible to subscribers. That’s difficult — but not impossible — for a small weekly newspaper to maintain, and although it’s something we’ll continue to explore, we frankly aren’t interested in the accompanying headaches.
So, instead, we are launching this new web log (or “blog”, as all the cool kids are saying these days). North by N’West is intended to be more of a conversation with readers than a definitive news source. We’ll use this space to talk about the stories we’re working on or to add an occasional addendum to a piece that ’s already in the newspaper. At times, we’ll break news that can’t wait until Saturday.
This is a baby step toward a bigger presence on the web. Here, you’ll also find links to resources around N’West Iowa, information about contacting the newspaper, and a list of services that might interest you. You’ll also find more behind-the-scenes “Shop Talk” than you would find in the regular newspaper. We have a lot of contact with newspapers in other parts of the country who are interested in how we operate our shop, and part of our goal is to make this a resource for our friends in journalism, too.
We’ll use this space to update you, daily, on headlines from around the state that might be of interest. Eventually, we hope to update Friday night sports scores here and to post some of the columns that appear on our editorial page. But for now this is a blank slate and we encourage you to visit often and watch it evolve.
You can e-mail me directly at jwagnerdsm@mchsi.com if you have questions, comments, and concerns.
As always, we thank you for your support.
Jay Wagner
