Power of the blog?
I think some of you may be reading too much into the "power" of this blog. There's not much here that you can't hear on any given Thursday at Schat's. This way you don't have to get up early in the morning. Nonetheless I am happy that the conversation is up and running.
As for the typos etc., it drives us crazy too and I wish we had a full time proof reader. But mostly it's page editors trying to put out several pages on deadline without a second pair of eyes, we just don't have the people. And when someone is on vacation as is the case this week, it's gets even tighter. But we do the best we can and most days I think we do a pretty good job - and, except for the sports pages, I would disagree that we are 80 percent wire copy. I'm still not sure what happened in Saturday's edition when the jump line was incorrect except that there appears to have been some mixup about whether there was open space on Page 13 for news copy. The page turned out to have a full page ad scheduled so I'm guessing the editor switched the jump to Page 19 when she found out about the ad, but then forgot to go back and change the number on Page 1. I know that on Friday night we were focused on making sure the story and photos of the funeral of Sgt. Buzzard were appropriate and sensitive and as things like that go, we erred somewhere else. Believe me we don't take it lightly.
The Another Voice pieces by Mr. Johnson and Mr. Walls had nothing but their home towns on them because that's all I know about them. Mr. Walls has written a number of times in past years on a variety of topics and I have met him once, and Mr. Johnson handed me his copy in person, but I don't know any more about them.
Thanks for the input on polls. As I said here earlier, they're certainly not scientific and they're just a fun way for our readers to weigh in on things and get to know our Web site if they hadn't already.
The site itself has been a yo-yo this past week. Up, down, up, down. There have been technical problems that have been driving our on-line editor Brittany Dashiell crazy but I think our Web hosts have them under control. Maybe.