A note from the Editor: Changes coming for Business Insider, Business section

Published: November 25, 2012 

One of the real positives for me during the past few years was our launch of Business Insider, the weekly magazine that focuses on content of value for our local business community.

We believe local business coverage is a critical piece of what a local newspaper should provide each week.

We’ve had wonderful support from members of our business community, who write six to eight columns a week sharing their expertise and perspectives. We were able to invest in people and space and provide the stories you asked for: stories about the people and companies that fill the Treasure Valley, their successes and failures and advice; a spotlight on new businesses and what’s under construction; and a heads-up on coming regulations at all government levels, to name a few.

We think it’s been a successful product for us and you — and you’ve told us that in a recent survey and with your “opt-ins” for the free section. We now have more than 10,000 subscribers.

The range of stories in the section can’t help but make all of us smarter about what’s happening in the Treasure Valley. Dave Staats and his business team, our presentation folks who design and copy edit, and our photographers who illustrate it have all contributed to its success. So has our advertising staff, which has created an opportunity for businesses to reach each other through their ads.

We like it so much, we want to deliver it earlier in the week — when the content is fresher. That is happening this Tuesday, Nov. 27. We took advantage of the holiday week, when we don’t publish Business Insider, to shift the publication day.

We also took this time to review our daily Business section. We’ve gone back and forth on having a separate section during the recent economic downturn. At one point, we put the content into the Sports section. We didn’t really like that, though, and worked out a way to bring it back as a separate section.

But we had to print the Business section earlier in the day, and that hasn’t worked well for us — or you. Some of the best business stories arrive after the deadline. Our stocks content barely arrives in time. And it was a real crunch for our presentation folks to edit and design it — and still stay long enough to do the later press run for the other sections.

So we are going to put our business news into our main news section starting Tuesday. You’ll find it between local/Idaho news and nation/world news. You’ll see your favorite content that you identified in our recent survey: the top business story and the headlines. We’ll still have a half-page of stocks, including local ones and others selected by our readers.

Because of constraints on the size of sections on our presses, we will move the personal finance information we had on Saturday to the Monday Life section. That includes the popular Dave Ramsey column and the Better Business Bureau scam alerts. Two other popular features, Ed Lotterman’s economics column and Marie McIntyre’s workplace coach column, will move to Business Insider. Our legal ads will move next to our classified ads.

That’s a lot of moving around, but we’ll make sure we tell you where things are each day.

We probably won’t have space for the weekly wrap-up of the stock market, but we’ll make it available online. Let Dave Staats (dstaats@idahostatesman.com) or Darlene Carnopis (dcarnopis@idahostatesman.com) know whether you are interested in getting that link.

And don’t worry about Dilbert. That’s one of our top five comics, as ranked by you in our comics survey this year. We’ll move that to the Life section into our lineup of daily comics. You’ll see it there Monday through Saturday. It’s already in our Sunday comics section.

As always, let me know what you think about the changes.

Vicki S. Gowler is editor of the Idaho Statesman. She can be reached at vgowler@idahostatesman.com or (208) 377-6403.

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