Monday, August 20, 2007

Annie Laurie Pomeranz gave it to us straight

Reprinted from the August 19, 2007 edition of The Sanford Herald.

By Billy Leggett
Editor, The Sanford Herald


“I’ve known every editor at The Herald for as long as I can remember, and I’ve given each of them a hard time.”

I heard those words during my first week here back in February. They came from an 89-year-old woman who intro­duced herself as “Anlapomeran” ... a name I lat­er learned was Annie Laurie Pomeranz. She’d introduced herself to many an editor, I imagine, and the name just rolled off her tongue like it was one word.

In the following few months, she would stop by my office a few times ... once to get on to us for not covering our local schools well enough. The other time, she praised us for simply making the paper better.

“If you were doing a bad job, you’d hear more from me,” she said in a serious tone, but followed by a quick smile.

Well, I didn’t hear more from her, but not because we were perfect or anything.

Unknown to me, Mrs. Pomeranz’s health was fading. She died a few weeks ago after an illness that spanned several months.

Now I’m sure there are many out there who wouldn’t necessarily mind that their biggest critic was no longer around. But not me ... not her, anyway.

Because I know Mrs. Pomeranz would be honest with me. The Herald needs that honesty more than ever this week, as Tuesday, we launch our redesign — a months-long study in ways we felt we could change the paper to make it better for our readers.

We announced this effort way back in April ... in my sec­ond month here. In late May, we hosted a successful reader forum where we introduced some of the rough drafts of the new look. In June, we did a lot of tweaking, and in July, we began revealing page examples online at my blog: .

Now it’s August. School’s about to start and news, inexpli­cably, usually “picks up” during this time of year.

We feel now is as good a time as ever to introduce our new product. In addition to what we feel is an attractive new look, we’ll have new fea­tures and an overall easier-to­-navigate newspaper.

So what’s new, besides the look?

First, we’re making our paper less confusing. It should­n’t have been confusing to begin with, but one of the com­plaints I’ve received since I got here is that our regular features — comics, crossword puzzles, Dear Abby, horoscopes, Billy Graham’s column, obituaries — aren’t always in the same place. Beginning Tuesday, they will be. Graham, Abby, comics and crosswords will always be in the middle of our Carolina section, which is no longer just a Wednesday/Sunday section.

It’s every day now. The sec­tion’s “theme” will be ever­changing, though — arts on Tuesdays, food on Wednesday, religion on Thursdays, enter­tainment on Fridays, schools on Saturdays and human interest stories on Sundays. The other major change (we’ll explain the changes all next week as each day arrives) is Page 2 in our news section.

No longer will it be nation/world news. Beginning Tuesday, it will be an extension of our front page ... with local photos, local briefs, more local stories, online teases, the “Rambler,” birthdays, meeting agendas and the daily almanac.

National news won’t be gone, however ... it’ll just be a little further back in our news­paper. The idea is this — we aren’t competing with cable and network news channels or larger metropolitan papers to bring you a bunch of national news.

Our focus will be local. We want to be known as the only media source that gives a darn about Lee, Chatham, Harnett and Moore counties. We want to be the one place you want to go when you want news from any of these areas.

Tuesday won’t be perfect.

What you’ll see next week isn’t going to be set in stone. We’ll tweak along the way, constantly looking for ways to make this newspaper better. We just need people to come to us and let us know what they want.

We want people like Annie Laurie Pomeranz, who gave it to us straight.