Cluck, cluck: Kent Reporter keeps evolving

I’ve said this before, but the analogy seems appropriate to blare again.

Newspapers are a lot like chickens.

Sure, at one point we were a dinosaur, but we always manage to evolve into something eminently more useful. No extinction here, folks.

So while some of the big daily journalism dinosaurs are stumbling around, our quicker, smaller Reporter paper continues to evolve and grow, both in print and online.

One of our most exciting new features is an online community calendar. You’ll find it on our home page at www.kentreporter.com.

What’s great is that it’s nearly all reader-driven. We are encouraging anyone with a community event to come and enter their information onto our calendar – a process that takes just a few minutes to do. Once you’re signed up to submit an item, you can type in your information – and in just a couple of hours, your event is posted for any reader to see, by date or event.

This is far quicker than our print edition, where we can’t always guarantee that an item will run, due to space issues. But space is no problem online (although you will be kept to a 50-word minimum for your event’s description.) So be sure to check this new feature out!

But if you don’t want to go the online route, we’ll continue to take items that you submit to us. You can send them to calendar@kentreporter.com, or mail them: Kent Reporter, 19426 68th Ave. S., Kent 98032.

The idea is to make the Kent Reporter more useful to you, whether you’re locked into computer technology, or happier sticking a stamp on an envelope.

The other thing I’d like to talk about is how we can get more of what our readers are saying into our paper. Most people think of us as the publication that shows up on their driveway twice a week. But we’re daily online news outlet, too, complete with video capacity as well as photos and the written word.

That’s where you come in.

We want to hear from you. Are you a local blogger? Drop me a line and let me know: we are looking for bloggers to whom we can link.

Have a video of a public event, funny happening or news item you’d like to share? We can work with you to get it featured onto our Web site.

Feeling the urge to vent your feelings on a topic? (I think we’ve gotten a serious earful with the Lingerie League.) Then e-mail us a letter.

Another item I’d like to introduce is the comment box that runs below each of our online news stories – you can express yourself on the same page as the reporter who wrote the story. And other readers can respond to you. The reporter, also.

This brings me to what a newspaper is supposed to be: a forum for its readers. It’s not just about our ideas and the news we create: it’s about what is happening from your perspective, too. Gone are the days when the newspaper was thought to “inject” people with ideas and opinions. It’s an interactive world out there, thanks to the wonderful technology that is increasingly at our fingertips.

We want Kent to be reflected back to you, in the light you give it.