It’s been a couple of months since Adams Publishing Group added the Carbon County News and 12 other Montana newspapers with the purchase of Yellowstone Newspapers and the team has been busy with restructuring, learning new systems and technology, recruiting new staff, and learning from community feedback.
We’re about to introduce more change, which we’re confident you’ll see as improvements. First, though, we wanted to thank you for your patience. Although our intention was to minimize disruption for our subscribers, no doubt we did not entirely get to this point without some effect on service, be it delivery or quality of our products.
Our team is confident that we’re through the worst of the disruption and we’re positioned to deliver the high standards our subscribers deserve. A few of the changes you’ll start noticing this week:
NEW PRODUCTS
A new look for CarbonCountyNews.com. The new site will give our journalists the ability to tell stories in new ways, with interactive features, multimedia, and automation that allows local staff more time to focus on reporting, writing and editing. The new site went live at 8 a.m. Wednesday.
Live feeds will replace manually posted wire content. As state, national and world news happens, it will flow automatically into our site so Associated Press news will be fresh and not just what was published in today’s newspaper.
A new e-edition. We’re changing platforms for the digital replica of the print edition, which will be easier to navigate. You’ll also have the option of downloading a native app from the App Store or Google Play. Although local news is our focus, we’re also introducing a national section to the e-edition that will be available every day, even on days when we don’t publish a newspaper (Sunday and Monday). The new e-edition will be live on Wednesday after the website switchover. Subscribers will need to log in, so have your password handy. If you forgot your password (we all do!) there is an option to reset. If you’re still having trouble, our customer service team is ready to help: 406-446-2222, press option 1. For faster service, please have the phone number connected to your account handy.
With both the e-edition and the website, there will be new options for advertisers, which allows us to build a stronger business that will ensure a healthy local news organization for years to come.
We’re moving the newspaper layout work to APG’s centralized design desk, which will free up local staff who can now focus all of their time on gathering news, writing, and telling our communities’ stories. You will not notice many changes to the print edition but most notable will be the width. The new print edition is slightly narrower.
MEET SOME OF OUR TEAM
Eleanor Guerrero joined Carbon County News in 2010 as a staff reporter. Eleanor has built a strong network in Red Lodge and is strongly committed to the community, searching out the stories that matter.
Denise Rivette, joined last year, and has already created an invaluable network of contacts from the Clarks Fork Valley and has written many local stories with a state focus.
Ann Sadler, joined the team in 2018, as our ad rep and has created a good advertising base around the County.
MOST IMPORTANTLY: WE WANT YOUR HELP
We’re planning a series of listening sessions, which will be the community’s opportunity to discuss a direction for our coverage and priorities. We want to hear from subscribers and non-subscribers, print and digital.
We’ll create a community advisory board, a group that will meet with our news team periodically, bringing feedback, questions and suggestions.
If you want to reach out directly to the news team, you will find their email addresses on the Contact page of our website, and printed on this page today under their photographs.
As you may have heard, in other parts of the country, publishing a local newspaper has become an increasingly challenging endeavor. We take that responsibility as a local news organization seriously and are here for the long run. We ask that you give us time to put the systems in place to adjust to those challenges.
Covering Carbon County is our privilege and we realize how important trust is in our relationship with the community. Thank you again for sticking with us through the changes in the past couple of months, and we hope to see you at one of our listening sessions. We’ll be announcing dates in the next couple of weeks.
