We’re looking at rearranging the newsroom furniture to encourage collaboration. We want to create areas with couches and tables where we can work on a project together or just drink coffee and talk about story ideas.
It will be interesting to see if it lures more workers back to the office. If so, will it result in any meaningful gains in quality or quantity of news production? At the very least, it might scratch that wistful itch to work in a busy newsroom again.
Sweating the small stuff
Here are some other things going on:
- Elections: We’re this close to rolling out a new elections page that we think will be very useful for you to find information about the candidates on your specific ballot. You’ll be able to see Columbian coverage, view any editorial board interviews, and see candidate bios.
- Not in the running: I see that Craig Brown has filed to run for Republican precinct committee officer in east Vancouver. I admire PCOs, who are the grass roots of politics. However, this candidate is a different person who shares my name. It would be inappropriate for working journalists to run for elected office. But, good luck, Craig!
- Missing page: A page of our May 1 e-edition went missing. Of course, it was the one with the New York Times Crossword puzzle, so we got a number of complaints. Worse, our first attempt to fix it ended up duplicating another page. The problem was mostly human error – someone made a typo in the upload instructions sent to our vendor’s computer, which caused the software to overwrite the page. So that was embarrassing. We’ll try not to do it again.
- Community funded journalism: Since our April 20 announcement, we have received several more large donations, and smaller donors have kicked in more than $30,000. We are recruiting and interviewing for three new reporters to join our metro news team, thanks to this generosity. To learn more or to donate, visit www.columbian.com/cfj.
