As you might have noticed, the paper you hold in your hands looks a little different: cleaner, better organized and, we’d like to think, more attractive.
The design tweaks are part of our ongoing effort to better serve you, our readers. Additionally, in reaching out to the community, we’ve increased our circulation from 12,000 to 15,000. The changes are about more than cosmetics and simple arithmetic, however.
We aim to bring you an enhanced Queen Anne & Magnolia News in the coming year, with more features on people, schools and sports and to give more space to community groups who are making a difference in our neighborhoods. In the process, the twice-monthly City Living supplement, which appeared in this paper the second and fourth weeks of the month, will become a free-standing weekly newspaper outside of Queen Anne and Magnolia.
Some of the best of the City Living features — book reviews, food and wine and opinion columnists — will appear in the News. Print is still viable in our digital world: People like holding a real newspaper in their hands. Of course not everyone feels that way. You can also follow us online at: www.QueenAnneNews.com or www.MagnoliaNews.net Our online audience is significant and growing.
Whatever the medium, we look forward to 2012 and wish you a happy and prosperous New Year.
Two New Year’s wishes:
Our New Year’s wish list is quite short. Two issues stand out like twin peaks from the civic foothills: the Seattle Police Department and the Seattle School District.
Seattle Chief of Police John Diaz must go.
We do not doubt the value of Mr. Diaz’s 30-plus years service with the department, but SPD’s problems, illuminated by the recent findings of the Department of Justice, and Diaz’s initial defensiveness about those findings, say it all. Only an outside change agent can fix things now. The last thing this city needs is more process-driven blather. Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn needs to man up and get it done.
The Seattle Public Schools needs the same change in attitude.
Last week The Seattle Times columnist Lynne Varner recalled
the words of the late Superintendent John Stanford upon arriving in town in 1995: “I hit hard and fast, make changes, get it going, and then I move on. I’m not a politician, and I’m not a survivalist. I don’t care if I get fired or not. I’m here for children…”
A dose of that attitude, on both fronts, is exactly what is needed.
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