Nose for News by Sarah Stultz

 

Tribune Publisher Crystal Miller and I hosted a reader advisory committee last week at the Tribune as part of our ongoing plan to gather more reader input and strengthen the newspaper.

We hope to host the committee every quarter and discuss things this group of readers likes and dislikes in the paper, along with ways we can improve.

The people on the committee are Joyce Nixon, Rick Mummert, Davis Gilbertson, Mary Nelson (represented at this meeting by Dawn Schroeder), John Holt, Don Nolander and Sarah Hensley.

We discussed some of our goals for the newspaper, along with their favorite and least favorite parts of the paper.

Coming away from the meeting, there are some new ideas we are excited to share with you that we hope to start implementing soon.

We hope to start a regular series of sections on our Community pages, including things such as what happened that day in history, facts to know and tell your friends, and a new column written by Tribune staff with answers to questions submitted by community members.

Have a question about something you’d like us to look into, whether large or small? Feel free to submit the question to me at sarah.stultz@albertleatribune.com, and we can seek out the answer for you.

It can be anything from “How do I find the tax value of my property?” to “Where is all snow being moved to?” or anything in between.

We haven’t figured out how often these will run, but hope to include them as a regular part of the paper. 

We plan to work with the Freeborn County Historical Museum on the history section and look forward to seeing all the things that happened in the past in our area.

We also heard feedback that the readers like quick reads and stories with lists, so we hope to keep this in mind as we move forward.

On the sports pages, we plan to implement weekly Big 9 sports standings, along with profiles on some of the new members of the Albert Lea Lakers team.

The Tribune is your community newspaper, so we want to make sure to include things you want to read, while at the same time serving our purpose of being a cheerleader, guardian and watchdog for the community.

As always, I encourage you to reach out to me with concerns or ideas you may have, or feel free to reach out to someone on the reader advisory committee if you’d rather.

We look forward to seeing this process strengthen the newspaper and plan to give you more updates as our meetings continue.

Sarah Stultz is the managing editor of the Tribune. Her column appears every Tuesday.