By Shereen Siewert, Wausau Pilot & Review Editor and Publisher
Happy Monday, readers. I hope you enjoyed the weekend.
As you’ve undoubtedly noticed by now, we flipped the switch to our new website last week. The transition has not been without its bumps and difficulties, which we expected. Thanks for bearing with us as we work through these issues. In the end, we are confident that this is a much more user-friendly product. By all means, when you see something that doesn’t seem right, shoot us an email and we’ll look into it, if we aren’t already.
Later this week, we’re going to experiment with our weekly event calendar email to keep you up to date on everything that’s happening (well, for now it’s mostly virtual, but still..) in our community. If you use our app, you’ll already notice an “events” tab that you can click on. You can choose either list or calendar view. And speaking of the app, that’s undergoing a massive change this month, too. Work on that begins Monday.
A few of you were upset about a headline on one of our stories this week. The headline referred to a “GOP power grab.” This was not one of our original stories, but an Associated Press supplement. We published it without giving a lot of thought to the headline (which, by the way, we do have the ability to change if we want to.) We should have given it more than a cursory look, and I’m sorry we didn’t. As written, it sounded pretty partisan.
I’ll tell you this. I’ve never had as much fun as I’ve had as a newspaper publisher.
Or, as much grief, either.
Readers love to holler at you about everything from headlines to typos to the number of ads. And don’t even get me started on the Facebook commenters. Holy mackerel, people.
Just remember this: our news is free, and we’ll never have a paywall. To make that happen, we rely on those advertisers, or we wouldn’t be here.
The other thing I’ve heard about this week is annoyance at the sign-in form that pops up asking for you to sign in when reading, and another that asks you to consider making a donation. You won’t see them all the time, but you will see them some of the time.
Why? Because it’s vital to the future of Wausau Pilot & Review’s work that we get and retain a relationship with our readers that isn’t dependent on social media. The pop-ups might be a little annoying, but it’s a small inconvenience to suffer to help preserve journalism. As little as $10 per month makes an enormous difference to keep our newsroom running.
And once this COVID-19 thing is over, and we’re all back in business, we’re going to have a lot more local news to report on, instead of all those partner publication stories you’ve been seeing.
One more thing: The biggest story of the week, and one we think is worth reading, is a look at how and why some suspects, even those with a long history of evading arrest, are being released. You can find that here.
Finally, if you have a high school, college, or military graduate you’d like to honor in our photo galleries, we’re doing that, too. We’re asking a $10 donation to defray our costs on the back end, but we hope you enjoy the final product. Read more here.
Thanks, as always, for reading. We appreciate every one of you.
