From time to time, I look at my old e-mails and notebooks of phone calls from readers to see if the suggestions, comments and complaints change much from year to year.
Many of them don’t.
A certain sameness shows up in the general comments. As an example, I got this comment from a reader this week:
“Imagine my disappointment when I opened my Tuesday morning paper and saw three candidates for Salt Lake City Mayor above the fold.
“I quickly spread the front page open and was saddened to see a small headline about 9/11 under the fold, near the bottom of the page.
“I look to the Tribune to take the lead in providing front page coverage every 9/11 so that we as a nation will never forget the shock, the anger, the grief.
“Our nation needs to see the photographs. . . . I want to be reminded of this horrible event in our nation’s history every Sept. 11th, every year, forever . . . it is indeed a bad memory. But it is a bad memory we must never forget.”
Similar comments from readers have arrived every September since 2001. This need for documentation and recall, of course, underscores the role of a newspaper as witness and reminder.
Then I get complaints, like this one in 2006, from confirmed Utes fans who want no news of other teams:
“Way too much BYU football coverage. A private religious school, 40 miles away in another city that has their own newspaper shouldn’t get more coverage than the state school on the hill. Put it in the D news, if you want but you are really upsetting a lot of Utah fans who feel like the Trib is their paper.”
The Tribune makes every effort to cover sports and teams from all schools in the state. Not all subscribers went to the U. of U.
I get stacks of e-mails and lots of phone calls from the puzzle fans among you. This one from September of 2006 is typical:
“I have been a Trib subscriber since I moved to town 20 years ago. For the most part, I think you have done a good job with the paper.
“Now, of all things I write to complain about, it is the Sudoku format in today’s paper. Simply put, it is too small.
“I understand the paper is probably trying to shrink items to fit more (articles, features, and advertisements). However, if you do Sudoku, you realize that there is a need to jot numbers on occasion to do trial runs on the numbers (especially on the harder puzzles).
“If an error is made, the space currently doesn’t allow for a clear correction. Because each box is dependent on the others, this makes for a real problem.”
I feel your pain. As many have noticed, we have increased the size of the Sudoku puzzle and now we have one every day. As a crossword puzzler, I understand how upsetting it is to have spaces that are too small.
And then, there are the calls and e-mails about the sticky ads on the front of the newspaper. This one from 2006 is typical of those I still get in 2007:
“I was wondering whose brilliant idea it was to make me peel a sticky-note ad off my front page every morning in order to see what’s printed on the newspaper underneath. Needless to say, it’s very annoying, and I strongly object to the practice.”
I hated them at first, too.
But there are two enduring truths that keep them on the front page:
1. Advertisers love them, because they work. People interested in the goods and services they advertise peel them off and stick them on the refrigerator or by the phone and then they call the advertiser to get information.
2. Since they can be peeled off of the paper, they are preferable to actual advertisements printed on the front page. Those ads make designing a good-looking and informative front page much more difficult. A number of newspapers across the country are trying printed front page ads and readers really hate those.
I repeat my directions for peeling off the sticky ads without tearing up the front page: Pull the sticky note s-l-o-w-l-y, starting at one of the bottom corners. In cooler weather, rub your finger across the part of the ad with the adhesive to warm it up, then you should be able to s-l-o-w-l-y peel it off.
