Five facts for your week

As we have visited with readers and community members, we have received feedback that in addition to headlines, cutlines and photos, bullet point lists catch attention. Over the past year, we have made a strong push toward writing for the reader. That sounds like a "Well, duh" statement, but it goes back to the fundamentals of writing. Cut it down to the basic facts and write for your audience. Why should you care? Why is this important to you the reader?

"5 facts for your week" was launched recently with those two things in mind: five facts, ideas or events that a Seward County Independent reader should know this week in a list with bullet points. It takes relevant information and organizes it in a relatively easy manner for the average browser.

I have received a few positive comments about this piece, so I know people are looking at it. Is there opportunity to improve it? Absolutely. Right now, it is event-heavy in a similar way to our daily update (sent in an email blast). I think this would be a great way to draw people to longer stories in the print edition. Perhaps there is a heated school board issue. If we lead the reader to that longer story, maybe we will have a better chance of them reading it. Community chat sites often include debates over issues of public concern. Through monitoring that site, it would be fairly straight-forward to include a fact about one of those issues because we are already attending those meetings and writing longer versions of those stories within the newspaper.

The design of the front page has stayed consistent over the past few months. While we haven't included this feature every week, when we have published it, we run it either over one or two columns off to the side of the main package on the front page. We are still discussing whether it should be in the same place week to week. I don't think that is completely necessary, but I do like having the same heading so that it is easily recognizable.