Adding some polish to the paper

By Staff
As you open today's edition of The Franklin County Times, we hope you'll note several changes.
First of all we hope you notice our new look. A lot of planning and trial and error went into everything from selecting typefaces to picking styles and colors.
The staff here at The Franklin County Times has taken a good, hard look at ourselves and decided what kind of news product we wanted to provide to our readers and advertisers.
What we found was we wanted to provide a more informative and consistent news product.
We wanted our readers to know where to look when they want to know what's going on in Franklin County. That place is in the pages of your Franklin County Times.
In the re-design of our newspaper we have included a more informative and reader friendly records page, or our page 2.
Our calendar items will be more detailed and informative than in the past. We've also added a looking back feature which will list the biggest stories in Franklin County from 50, 25, 15 and 10 years ago. Obituaries and the weather will continue to be mainstays of this page, as will our local birthday calendar.
On page three you will find our Shutterbugs feature, which has been moved from our opinions page.
On page three you will also find restaurant scores, police reports, land and property transactions, marriage licenses, business licenses and building permits.
On page four you'll find our Opinion page with columns from our staff here at The Times and people from around the state. You'll also find an editorial addressing a local issue and one outside opinion addressing a state or nationwide issue.
We've also added a daily editorial cartoon.
On Sundays you will find a local business page. Here you can read about local businesses and the nation-wide trends that affect them.
You will also find business briefs about local people who have been promoted or graduated from a continuing education class.
Our Friday Focus page has been moved to Wednesday and renamed Lifestyles. Here is where you'll find Melissa Cason's feature stories about people and things around our community along with several new tidbits.
All of this change would not be possible without our readers and you will play a large role in our continued growth.
We still need your engagements, your weddings, anniversaries, birthdays, your good student news, your calendar items, church events, fundraisers, news tips and just about anything else you can think of. This is your newspaper, as it has been for more than 125 years, and we want you to be a part of each and every publication.
We encourage those of you who have stopped reading regularly to pick up The Times and get to know us again. Many things have been added that we hope have made us a better community newspaper.
Our new look and feel has been in the works for nearly six months and we're pleased to finally be able to present it to you today. We hope you'll enjoy it.