Online readers: Today I'm asking for your help. We are making changes to our Web sites, kjonline.com and onlinesentinel.com. I'm wondering: How do you like them?

The best thing we've done, to my mind, this year is we have consistently produced 10 to 25 breaking-news updates a day, Monday through Friday. We are transforming from a daily, morning newspaper environment to an all-day, print and online, news operation. We still pay considerable attention to our two daily newspapers. But we realize online readers want more.

We've added crime news, government news, traffic/commuting news and more to our breaking-news reports. I still want us to do more on weekends, when our staffing is "thinner." But we've made nice progress.

In recent weeks, we've launched three blogs: Commuting with AJ (by reporter AJ Higgins); a NASCAR blog by Jennifer Lizotte of Pownal; and mine. What do you think of those? What would you like us to add? There's no question we'll do more, but we want to be smart about it. We have a finite number of resources to throw around.

By year's end, it's safe to say you will see more changes. We are contemplating more staff blogs, Q&As with staff writers, a photo gallery and blog featuring our outstanding wildlife art, and more. Now's a good time to weigh in. You can post your comments here or e-mail me privately at econrad@centralmaine.com

Remember, we are a small-ish news operation. We have 61 employees at the KJ and Morning Sentinel newsrooms. So please try not to model us after the New York Times or USA Today. But, having said that, if there are topics that major Web sites address and we do not -- yet the topics fit our markets -- that would be helpful too.

So last week I was down in Philadelphia Phillies land. Yes, the Red Sox are the better team. But what's really apparent is how strong the NESN and Red Sox broadcasting teams are compared to what Philadelphia offers.

I missed Jerry Remy, Tom Caron, Dennis Eckersley (easily NESN's best analyst — a very good one in my opinion) and the others more than I imagined.

New England has a lot going for it. The region attracts talent and it's really obvious comparing Sox broadcasts vs. the Harry Kalas (like him but...), Chris Wheeler and Gary Mathews TV team on the Phillies games.

Interesting note: The Phillies' best post-game analyst is former closer Mitch "Wild Thing" Williams. Only Philadelphia, which hates and yet loves its losers, would allow the guy who threw the home run ball to Joe Carter — the one that lost the 1993 Series for Philly — to return and become a well-received commentator. It's like watching Bill Buckner after every Sox loss on NESN. But in Philadelphia, they're fine with it.

I'll be in Pennsylvania this week with my two daughters, visiting my family, touring an anthracite coal mine and visiting Knoebel's Grove, one of the neatest and most family-friendly amusement parks (Elysburg, Pa.) anywhere.

I may post from the road, if I have time.

You can read more about my father and my family in my latest column for the newspapers. See it here: One dad's tribute to his own

In today's Kennebec Journal, you can read a story about how Augusta is trying to turn up the voltage on its July Fourth events. Maine's capital city is trying hard to use the riverfront areas to its advantage, and this is the latest example. You can read the story here: Officials planning a capital Fourth of July

Will it work? I don't know but it's worth the try. Lewiston-Auburn and Bangor are basically trying to do the same thing. Some folks in Waterville are talking similarly, and hoping the Hathaway mill project is a big step in that direction.

On the other hand, Augusta is an oddly segmented city. It has jewels — the Capitol, U-Maine Augusta, the underdeveloped riverfront areas, and now two major, new shopping areas.

But unlike Portland, Portsmouth, N.H. and even Boston, it's hard to get from here to there. You can't walk from the riverfront area to the Capitol complex without risking your life crossing Western Avenue. UMA is a gem that glitters more with each year but it's a geographic island. You have to get in your car to get there and get in your car to go from there to any of the places I list above.

We recently did a series about Augusta's promise and challenges. It was called, "Augusta Comes of Age." You can read it here: The Future of Augusta

You know what Augusta needs most? A dining district. There are good restaurants scattered around, such as the Senator and others. But there's no critical mass.

We all will welcome the Slates' reopening and that's great for Hallowell. Augusta should have three or four Slates, and preferably you and I could walk to all of them from the same parking garage.

When that day comes, the appetizers are on me.

It's always interesting when powerful parties in the Legislature go after one another. That's what happened last week when state Sen. John Martin, arguably the most influential Maine legislator of our time, took on the Maine School Boards Association, Maine Municipal Association and other groups for lobbying "against" the recently passed school-consolidation plan.

Martin has filed Freedom of Access Requests asking these groups and a few others to detail how much money they spent lobbying against the consolidation plan. Martin's rationale is that these groups receive their funding from municipalities and school districts in the form of membership payments that taxpayers ultimately are making. So, he said, these groups may have used tax money to oppose a plan that would save tax money. The groups are responding by saying they've done nothing wrong and they are startled by Martin's tactic and criticism.

There are some ironies here. For starters, powerful legislators rarely use FOA laws to get data. They have other means at their disposal, including questions at committee meetings, private letters and telephone calls, and reviewing lobbying-disclosure forms when they come in. FOA requests come from frustrated citizen and lobbying groups, and from the media, when they feel the government has information that would explain something, but that information hasn't been made available. On the national level, genealogists use Freedom of Information requests routinely. In Maine, George Smith of the Sportsman's Alliance of Maine is one of the FOA's biggest supporters because his group at times questions various state agencies.

The MMA and MSBA are very influential among state legislators, as many of our lawmakers get started in politics by being elected municipal leaders and school committee members. Much of their training on FOA laws and a vast array of legislative and public-policy issues come from the MMA and MSBA during their earlier, political careers. So it is interesting that an influential lawmaker is tackling two groups that are among the most influential at the Statehouse -- in dealing with lawmakers who they know well.

It is also worth noting that legislators don't always negotiate in public. Some critics say the recently passed state budget (which included the school plan) wasn't aired enough. That charge is being leveled at a tax-reform package currently being debated. Martin probably has been party over the years to his share of quietly brokered, yet very important, agreements.

Finally, when journalists do fight open-records denials and executive sessions held at the local-government level, it is not uncommon for the MMA to represent the municipality in trying to keep a report, some facts, or an excecutive-session conversation confidential. I don't mean to sound criticial of these groups. I am sure the MMA and MSBA help our local leaders invaluably by teaching them about hiring and recruiting, regulatory issues, making budgets and much more. But it is intriguing to see a top legislator fight these groups on FOA grounds when it's something journalists also do on occasion.

Here are links to Susan Cover's Sunday story on this issue and the Kennebec Journal and Morning Sentinel editorial that followed:
Martin queries lobby tactics

Hardball politics from the master

Here are links to the MMA and MSBA Web sites:
MMA
MSBA

Readers: In today's blog entry, I'm sharing the critique I wrote Monday and shared with our staff. Sometimes, readers ask us if anyone's editing the paper. Are we reviewing what we do -- before, during and after publication? The answer is yes, and I hope this critique points to that. I do these several times a week.

It's not the only critical tool we use: Our other editors give feedback to reporters, photographers and page designers all the time. And serious errors or patterns of performance can be dealt with in other ways. But these critiques are useful, though it can hurt when a staffer is the (unnamed) subject of the editor's criticism.

Don't get me wrong, we still make mistakes -- in punctuation, grammar, statistics and even facts on occasion. But I wanted readers to know that we take our performance very seriously.

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Folks: It's been a while since I've written a critique, daily or otherwise, although we have been communicating in person and via e-mail with regard to deadlines, earlier delivery, the Web sites, and more. We have a lot of balls in the air but we are making nice progress on most fronts.

Recent highlights:
Last Sunday's story by AJ Higgins on Jean-Paul Poulain was a good example of following breaking news with good, explanatory and even semi-investigative reporting and writing. We already knew that Poulain was dead and who allegedly killed him. But we didn't know why the once-renowned singer got to this point in his life, and how he crossed paths with two young men on the night of his death. AJ explained all of that, and it was a pretty dark -- but very readable -- tale.

We are using some of our best visual talent -- including Sharon Wood and Ben Sturtevant -- on A1 more than we have in the past. Both played roles in the KJ's Poulain centerpiece, and Sharon also helped design the KJ Sunday front page yesterday with graduation art. However, good visual planning requires knowing early on what stories are coming, filing them earlier, etc. I also want to make sure the Morning Sentinel uses Sharon and Ben more, and Stacy Blanchet as her time permits.

The A1 "mixes" in both papers Sunday and Monday (most recent weekend) was very good. Kudos to Travis L. for his surprising enterprise story on OTBs, timed for the final weekend of the Triple Crown. Craig Crosby broke a nice story about two men planning a winery, and explained how they came together. Gary Remal's A1 story on the flatiron building was a thorough, central-city enterprise piece, perfect to lead the Monday paper.

We're doing this kind of enterprise when we also are scrambling to cover local graduations, and prepare for an election tonight. This election's not huge, but they're all important, and we do need to preview each community's vote and report the results (remember, deadlines have changed for tomorrow). Thanks to both News staffs on all of this. Having Sports pitch in an A1 enterprise story also helped a lot.

I want to commend photog Andy Molloy on his graduation "coverage" in Monday's KJ. Andy was at no fewer than 4 graduations yesterday, and it's obvious from the way he shot them -- and how the desk (Stephanie Law, perhaps?) played them -- that we took great care to take unique photos town-by-town, images with different perspectives. Yet, they worked to complement one another in a visual package. Very well shot, chosen and displayed.

Coulda been betters:
An Outdoors page piece a week or so back had a local police officer holding a giant "turtle," which we identified -- and he identified -- as a snapping turtle. It wasn't. It was an exotic species of tortoise, and many naturalists in the area quickly realized this. There's a lesson in this for all of us: When in doubt, check these things. This is no slam to our newspapers; when I was in Portland "we" ran a non-milking cow photo with a story on milk prices; we ran a photo of an inedible fiddlehead species with a recipe story on cooking fiddleheads. These are easy mistakes to make but they are profound too. If we have an animal, plant, bird, fish and we're not sure ourselves what it is, take the time to ask an expert.

Our on-deadline story Saturday about the New Portland homicide was confusing. There were multiple time references, yet most did not include a.m. or p.m. after the times, so readers really couldn't understand the time sequence of what happened. The first two sentences were redundant and even used many of the same words. The Sun-Journal story didn't have any more facts, really, but was clearer. They followed for Sunday; we followed for Monday. This is a major crime story and the killer is still at large. It's the best story going at either paper right now.

Readers notice
A reader wrote to me over the weekend expressing dismay that a high school sports story included a fair amount of medical detail that one top performer was back after suffering an injury several weeks ago. This was one sentence in the body of a story or roundup. The reader thought that was too detailed, and I would agree. I might not agree if it was Tom Brady, or a top pro athlete, but we can be a little more sensitive and careful in writing about high school students.

It's not an easy time to be a journalism intern. If you've signed up for this work, it means you're probably thinking of a career in a tough industry that's getting tougher.

We landed a fine intern this summer at the Kennebec Journal and Morning Sentinel. His name is Steve Kolowich. He will be a senior at Bowdoin College this fall, where he will edit the campus weekly, The Bowdoin Orient. A native of Concord, Mass., Kolowich spent last summer interning with The McLaughlin Group in Washington, D.C.

You can read my newspaper column about Steve and his take on the journalism industry here:
Courage, with a qualifier

You can read some of Steve's recent stories here:
199 graduates moving on

Winthrop nursery school closing after 26 years

Hall-Dale five remain a family

The deed has been done.

The state budget is passed, and Gov. John Baldacci's staff is saying it includes the biggest overhaul of public education in Maine in more than 50 years.

The plan calls for 80 school districts in Maine, which is way less what than we have now. It has a lot of carrots and sticks I won't detail here: Cutting funding for schools that don't find consolidation "partners;" offering incentives for some that do; giving a deadline for deciding. Etc.

Baldacci's central point is that the amount of money we spend on pre-college education has been growing steadily and even quickly, but our public school enrollment is dropping. He says we have a lot of great superintendents and other top administrators in Maine, but the number we have isn't justified by the number of students we have, at least not any more.

What do you think about all this? The plan no longer says (an early draft did) which school districts should merge with which.

I am not a native Mainer; I've lived here since 1995. My young daughters (two) both were born here and attend public schools, so my family has a big stake in all this.

Here's what I think: Consolidating school districts will happen in the aggregate. In Winthrop, where we live, the draft consolidation plan had "us" merging with: Hall-Dale, Maranacook and Monmouth. Those are good schools, and I think they'd say that about one another. I haven't heard much worrying about this in our town.

However, I really suspect that if, say, someone would ever suggest closing two of these four high schools (no one is saying this now), there'd be a battle royale over that. I attended a semi-rural high school in Pennsylvania with about 330 kids in my graduating class, and it never felt overwhelming to me. But if you're used to 50 or 75 in a high school class, you might rail against a merged high school with double that number. And if you are being pressured to merge with your sports-rival high school, well...

We also have heard that rural school districts remain concerned. I think that's because northern and Downeast Maine schools serve as cultural centers for fairly large land areas. That's true in some parts of Central Maine, too, but not to the same degree (my opinion). There's more to do here.

There were some odd "dance partners" in that draft list that I keep referring to. Our last hometown, Cape Elizabeth, was supposed to "merge" with South Portland. I think the Cape parents would secede from the United States (there are probably enough lawyers there to pull it off) before they'd OK that. Those are very different school districts with entirely different approaches to school spending.

Those are my thoughts. What are yours?

John Christie, the publisher of the Kennebec Journal and Morning Sentinel, has led meetings the past two days telling all of our 200-plus employees what we've done well in recent months and talking about the challenges — John candidly calls them "problems" — facing our company and the newspaper industry.

His message is by no means a downer. I'm really abbreviating his eloquent (he is my boss) words. He's saying:

— The Kennebec Journal and Morning Sentinel, and our Web sites, have one of the best "reaches" in our industry. Eighty-seven percent of all people in our markets read our newspapers or one of our Web sites over a 7-day period. So far as we know, only the Times-Picayune of New Orleans matches that, and people down there have so depended on that newspaper for their news post-Hurricane Katrina that it's no wonder that very good paper is a national leader.

— Paid circulation is dropping slowly at both of our newspapers. But, our circulation numbers are better than most newspapers, which are declining more quickly. If you're wondering how our "reach" can be so strong while our paid circulation gradually drops, it's because some people share a newspaper several times after one person buys it. Also, the Web sites are gaining readers all the time, readers who don't always buy the print paper (but often do). It's a safe bet that sky-high fuel prices encourage people to become "pass-along readers" too.

— Our advertising sales are strong, especially locally. Not as great as five years ago, but strong. Local advertisers realize how strong our market "reach" is, and know that we're a good place to put your money if you want a whole lot of people in this area to see what you're selling. Our sales staff also knows its customers well.

— Readers told a research company we hired last year that basically they like our newspapers and rely on them. The research firm found no major content weaknesses, and that's highly unusual for them. They do not tell you what you want to hear. We are weak in serving women between the ages of 18 to 35, but mostly we get favorable ratings. We are reaching out to young, female readers in our Life and Leisure Sunday section. You might keep an eye out for that.

— Our researchers said there is one thing our readers want us to change immediately, and they told us loud and clear: They want earlier delivery. Central Mainers are early risers and they think we are delivered a little too late. Production Director Dick Boyer and Circulation Director Tim Crilley are working with John, me and many others on that. We will have more to say about it soon. This will happen, sooner rather than later.

John's other message to our staff — many of whom have worked here for a decade, two decades, or longer — is that this is a time for change. We are doing breaking-news updates on the Web, blogs, gearing up for online ad sales, seeking to deliver the paper earlier, and much more. All of these things force employees to change focused and efficient routines that were years in the making. That's hard to do.

The newspaper industry isn't renowned for speedy change or innovation, though I think this is happening with our Web sites especially.

You know the saying in Maine: Once you drive past Freeport or maybe Brunswick, the number of Volvos drops dramatically (no offense to some of our advertisers, please).

Truth be told, I never was much of a European car guy — or fashionable editor. I drive a 2003 Chevrolet S-10 pickup truck, four-wheel drive and with four doors. Fits our family just right. I'm 5-8, my wife's 5-4 and my daughters are 9 and 6. The coonhound rides in the back on short trips if he's good. We don't need a honkin' big truck. This one's fine.

Oh, and I'm the editor of the Kennebec Journal and Morning Sentinel. This is my new blog. I'll try to update it pretty much daily. I'm big on Web content but slow on technical skills, so Elizabeth Comeau in the KJ newsroom will be my editor and producer. (Thanks, Liz!)

By way of background, I spent most of the past 11 years as an editor at the Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram; five as managing editor. We lived in Cape Elizabeth. Volvos there are pretty much required (No, my wife drives a Dodge Caravan. Good try.), new, loaded ones with heated leather seats, multiple CD players, moonroofs and all-wheel drive in case the super-long driveway wasn't plowed well enough.

After a short stint as editor last year in Connecticut (at a newspaper sold not once but twice since December), my family and I are SO happy to be back in Maine. I started here Jan. 17. I have 13 years of reporting experience in Pennsylvania and Florida and close to that now (scarily) as an editor, in Maine and Connecticut.

Here is a link to my most recent column, which appeared in the KJ and Sentinel. It was pretty controversial, and received a fair number of reader comments and e-mails:
Covering death toughest assignment

Feel free to send me stuff. I'd love it if this blog is mostly questions and answers with you.