Dear Readers,

Seven weeks ago, in mid-December, we rolled out the redesign of the Post Independent. Your newspaper got a new flag, new fonts, new page design and new organization. By and large, the response we’ve gotten has been positive.

While one reader called it “dull and lifeless,” most people have told me they like the new look and appreciate our efforts at modernizing the paper.

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It’s funny, but the thing we anguished over the most in advance of making the change has resulted in zero complaints.

For weeks, members of the redesign team debated over how to best organize sections of the paper. We settled on what came to be called a flex concept, which devoted all the space possible on a given day to our news package, then followed that with the new community pages, the commentary pages and then sports.

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We felt it was a logical, but somewhat radical, change.

We were very worried that readers would feel disoriented once the popular commentary pages moved out of pages 4 and 5 and began floating around on different pages further back in the paper.

I have yet to hear a reader gripe about this. That tells me the paper’s organization makes sense, which is what we hoped for.

Mountain Mailbag

is looking for you

Another big change we made was to run Mountain Mailbag five days a week. (It’s replaced by Business Briefs on Mondays.)

Mailbag is the place for news about people: births, engagements, weddings, anniversaries and military honors. It’s also the place for fun stuff, whether it’s the snowman your neighbors built, a snapshot from your vacation, your favorite pinochle parlor or a goofy pet picture.

Mailbag editor Donna Daniels is always on the prowl for nutty Mailbag items, and the best ones come with pictures. Here’s how you can submit your items:

By mail, to the Post Independent, 2014 Grand Ave., Glenwood Springs, CO 81601.

By e-mail (attaching jpeg photos works great) to mailbag@postindependent.com.

By fax (text only) to 945-4487.

Or by dropping by our office, at the address above, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. weekdays.

We can scan your photo prints and you can come back to pick them up after your item appears, or we can convert your electronic attachments. But please, write a caption for the photo that tells us who is in the picture, and give credit to the photographer.

If you have any questions about Mailbag, call Donna at 945-8515, ext. 520.

New policy for

letters to the editor

It’s happened again. We have a huge stockpile of letters to the editor, and not enough space to run them all in a timely manner.

And some letters are very long, hogging space that could be used to run more letters from other writers.

We also know there’s an inverse relationship between the length of a letter and the number of readers who make it all the way to the end. In other words, the longer the letter, the fewer the number of readers.

We also want to maintain our letters page as a lively forum for many diverse comments from our highly opinionated and eloquent readership.

To that end, effective immediately, the Post Independent is limiting the length of letters to the editor to 250 words. That’s about 10 column inches on the printed page, not counting the headline and salutation.

We have a handy word count tool in our word processing software, so we can tell as soon as we import your letter into our system how it shakes out. Letters that run over will be returned to the author, if possible. We’ll give you your letter’s word count, and remind you of the 250-word limit.

Those of you writing by e-mail should be able to check this before you send.

In the interest of more voices on the Commentary pages, let the short-letter writing begin.

– Heather McGregor is the managing editor of the Glenwood Springs Post Independent.