News / Clark County News

From the Newsroom: Five tips for Columbian readers

The Columbian

Published: March 30, 2024, 6:09am

The Trending Now stories on The Columbian's homepage are chosen by readers. The stories are a real-time look at what people are reading.

A phone call from a reader the other day made me realize you might benefit from some insider tips on how to get the most out of your subscription. So with the help of Web Editor Amy Libby, I made an unofficial list:

Subscribe to our free Afternoon Briefing newsletter. Actually, please subscribe to several of our newsletters. But my top tip is to take Afternoon Briefing, which should arrive about 3 p.m. on weekdays. It alerts you to breaking news we have posted since 7 a.m. Tuesday’s newsletter was a good example. It let readers know about a major power outage in Hazel Dell and what caused it, a crash where a local child riding a bicycle was trapped under a school bus, the Baltimore bridge collapse, and the news that a third Trader Joe’s store was in the works for east Vancouver. (Laugh if you want, but the story was very popular with readers.)

Read the Monday ePaper. Although it doesn’t go into print, we produce a full digital newspaper and release it to our subscribers Monday mornings. We anchor the front page with a local photo-story package, along with other top stories of the day. Inside, you’ll find our regular selection of wire news, along with local breaking news from the weekend and an enhanced Opinion section. Of course, it also contains weekend Sports news and the Monday comics and puzzles.

If you are a print subscriber, you have free access to all of our online content. Visit myaccount.columbian.com to activate your subscription. If you have trouble, contact our circulation customer service representatives, 360-694-2312.

I know some of our print subscribers don’t wish to get their news online. So we’ll continue to print the Monday comics and puzzles in our Tuesday paper, and the TV grid on the previous Saturday.

Check the “Trending Now” and “Editor’s Choice” lists. These lists appear on our home page, www.columbian.com. The trending list shows what is popular on our website. Because a robot compiles the list, random Columbian stories that got linked on another site sometimes appear. When I checked Thursday, though, seven of the eight stories were recent and local (the other story was about the bridge collapse in Baltimore).

Amy chooses the content for the Editor’s Choice list, which appears farther down the home page. She looks for the highest quality stories — stories that are unique to The Columbian, that have local impact or are just fun to read. Frequently, stories appear on both lists, but by looking at both, you can tell what the readers and the editors like.

Use our app to read ePaper when you are away. This is my favorite tip on the list, as my wife and I are at the age when we have the time and resources to do some traveling. I don’t own a tablet reader, and I don’t want to take my laptop on airplane trips, so I end up with my phone as my best resource. By using The Columbian’s app and either my data connection or free Wi-Fi, it’s easy to read every issue of the paper. To date, the most exotic place I’ve read The Columbian was Komodo Island, Indonesia. If you’ve read our paper somewhere exotic, drop me a note. I’d love to find out where you were!

Access back issues in multiple ways. Full issues of The Columbian from 1908-2011 are available at newspapers.com. (A fee applies.) The digitized microfilm you’ll find there is electronically searchable, so if, for example, you are looking into prune dryer fires, it will be easy to get the scoop. Editions from January 2020 forward are available on ePaper. Look for the blue bar on the top of any ePaper page, and click on the icon that looks like a file box. (And, thanks to the reader whose question about this inspired this column.)

I hope these tips are helpful. Thanks for reading our paper and supporting our local journalism.

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