Column gets split personality (4/27/05)

What’s in a name?

That’s a good question, especially when it appears in a column that goes by two different names in two different papers.

Let me explain, or try to.

For readers of the Dunkirk News and Sun, this column was launched back in January of 1992. It hummed along, minding its own business for quite awhile, flying under the radar in many ways.

Readers of The Commercial Review didn’t see it unless they happened to pick up a copy of the Dunkirk weekly.

In fact, my own wife and kids didn’t see it on a weekly basis. Instead, I’d photocopy three or four months worth of columns at a time and take them home for them to read.

That worked pretty well, and I enjoyed the freedom of writing for a Dunkirk audience while having few readers from the Portland area.

Eleven miles may not seem like much in the way of distance, but it provided me with new flexibility. It loosened me up somehow.

(Column writing is different from editorial writing, though readers sometimes think of the two as interchangeable.)

The arrangement worked just fine for six years. Then in 1998, my family embarked on our Fulbright adventure in Moldova. I wanted to keep the column going, and after talking it over with my wife and kids decided it should run in both the weekly and the daily.

That’s when the name confusion started.

I thought I had written a memo explaining that the column should have the same name in both papers, but there’s a good chance I forgot to do so.

By the time we finally received some papers in a care package, the column had been running for months under two different names.

In The News and Sun, the standing head for the column is “Back in the Saddle,” reflecting the fact that it started when I was filling in as editor of the weekly. In The CR, it’s called “Dear Reader,” which was the name of an every-once-in-awhile column that tried to explain newspaper policies and decisions.

Does it matter? Probably not.

But in the process of re-designing the daily paper, it seems to make sense to straighten things out.

So, for now, we’ll toddle along somewhat schizophrenically, writing the same column under two titles.

But in a few weeks, when we hope to launch the re-design, we’ll revert to a single name just to simplify things.

Which one? Wait and see.[[In-content Ad]]