Put that there

Welcome to this week’s Reno News & Review.

We rearranged some stuff in the paper last week, and enough people asked me about it that it’s worth an explanation.

Here’s what changed: Letters/Streetalk went from page 7 to page 4, View from the Fray went from page 8 to page 7, and the editorial went from page 4 to page 8.

First, the thing with having View from the Fray and Right Hook on the same spread wasn’t working. It kind of set up a liberal vs. conservative tone, which worked fine with Hook, because he’s a bit antagonistic toward liberals, but it never worked with Deidre. While she tends toward the liberal viewpoint, that’s not really how she approaches life. And it’s not that she’s a centrist, either. I guess that it’s that she’s looking for places between the poles where there is agreement. So the point/counterpoint setup never made sense.

I wanted to make a metaphorical point with the placement of Letters to the Editor and Streetalk: The readers are the most important thing. I wanted them to appear first in the paper (OK, after Contents, but it wouldn’t make any sense to have the Contents page anywhere but first). These are our peeps—the reason for our existence as a newspaper—and they belong up front.

Finally, with the editorial, if you’ll kind of relate the thinking on the Fray and Hook thing, you’ll understand it’s appropriate to move the editorial, the voice of the editorial section of the newspaper, next to Hook. Think of the New York Times as the model. The Times “op-ed” page (opposite-editorial) faces the editorial page. The Times encourages submissions for the op-ed page that disagree with their editorials.

To simply state the obvious, if there are two opinions that are almost guaranteed to be diametric opposites, it’s the editorial and Mike Lafferty’s column. We’ll see. If we don’t like it this way, we’ll change it again.