Wow, what a week it’s been here at The Sun. On Tuesday we launched The Westerly Sun all access, which provides digital access to all the news and photos and special features we produce, and on Wednesday we announced that our property was being listed for sale.
What does it all mean? What’s happening to my Westerly Sun?
What it means is that as a business we are advancing with the times in an industry that now considers change the only constant, and our advancing with all that change is a good thing. The two announcements are key elements in our overall strategy to stay current with the industry and relevant with readers. all access brings us fully into the digital age by making available all of our local news, sports and entertainment coverage in newer mobile digital formats such as smartphones and iPads in addition to our existing web access that’s been available on your desktop and laptop for years. I realize that to many of our long-time readers, all this talk about digital access and iPad apps may be a bit jarring, but I want to assure all our readers that the print version of The Sun — the print version of all newspapers — will be around long after I’m gone.
As I said last week, the backbone of all this digital access remains our print product and the reporters, photographers and editors who produce that material. And they have to be located locally to generate all that unique local news that no one else is generating. So with today’s column, I want to reassure all of our print readers and digital viewers that while our property has been listed for sale, we aren’t going anywhere. We can’t go anywhere. We don’t want to go anywhere.
You can run a restaurant just as well in Ohio as you can in Westerly, and you can sell shoes or clothing or tools anywhere, you can repair cars anywhere and you can provide legal and accounting services anywhere. The only place you can cover and provide news from the greater Westerly area is in the greater Westerly area.
As was mentioned in Wednesday’s front-page story about the real estate listing, we now occupy less than one-third of our building at 56 Main St., now that our newspaper is printed in Attleboro, Mass., by the Sun Chronicle. That change, last November, was also a planned, strategic move as other community news organizations in the industry consolidate the production of their print product with nearby large news organizations.
All of these changes, the relocation of our printing and the potential sale of the building, allow us to spend money on the core of our business, reporting the news and helping advertisers spread the word about their products and services. To that end, there is yet another project that we are embarking upon, and that is the $1 million investment in new technology, which will provide our news and advertising departments throughout the corporation state-of-the-art equipment for all that they do. I may be known as a fiscal conservative, and some might not believe this, but I’m happier spending $1 million on technology upgrades tied directly to our mission that I am spending $10,000 to repair a roof or an air conditioning unit.
We’ve been printing in Attleboro for more than three months, but we’re still here. We may relocate to another local address but we’ll still be here. And these moves and others are intended to keep us here for the long haul.
As always, please let me know what you think.