the editor talks with you

Ifeel what the buggy whip makers must have felt 100 years ago. A noisy, smoke-belching contraption on wheels was about to put them out of business.

I grew up reading newspapers. I loved them, delivered them, wrote for and edited them and finally owned a few of them.

Now I find that fewer and fewer of us like to pick real newspapers up, hold them in our hands, and thumb through them to read about our neighbors and friends, check on the health and welfare of our community, and make important shopping decisions.

Readers’ needs and wants are changing and we have to change with them, too.

You may not be aware of it but an important event occurred last week. After 15 years online, the Chronicle and the Lake Murray Fish Wrapper introduced a new electronic edition. We did it at the request of many of you who wanted to be able to read it on your smart phones.

Even the technology for reading has changed dramatically in those 15 years.

When we published our first electronic edition in 2003, the world was a different place. We were still recoveing from the horrors of the 2001 loss of almost 3,000 American lives at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. We were waging two wars against terrorists in the Middle East.

Most of us still read local news in print or on a computer monitor. Remember those bulky, heavy cathod ray babies?

Now you walk around with your monitor in your pocket. You text friends, check the time, weather forecast, last night’s sports scores and your bank balance with it.

On it, you even read news (fake and the real stuff). You should be able to read the Chronicle and Fish Wrapoer there, too.

There are several drawbacks to this.

The articles and photos you’ll save are digital, so getting physical copies of engagement, wedding and birth announcements for your scrapbook takes another step. You might not clip out once important things like recipes, but who cooks anymore? We live in a fast food, fast everything world.

You can’t wrap fish in it, train your new puppy on it or line the canary cage. But almost no one does that anymore, do they?

What you can do with it, electronically, is read the Chronicle quietly in class, church or while your husband is watching another boring baseball game on TV.

There are other reasons I recommend reading the Chronicle this way:

• The new electronic edition is designed to be read easily on smart phones. We designed it that way when we realized that’s how you and others wanted to read it.

• As a subscriber, you will find it in your inbox each week just as the print edition lands in subscriber mail boxes each week.

• When you need to find a news item, obituary, engagement, wedding or anniversary announcement from an earliert edition, it’s fast and easy to check our archive.

• When you shop for a product or service from our advertisers, you can click on the ad and it will take you directly to their site for more information and to order.

• If you should – heaven forbid – encounter a problem, we offer 24 hour a day techical support, even if our office is closed.

• You can renew or subscribe with one click. No envelope or stamp needed.

Farewell, buddy whip. Hello, technology.

We welcome your thoughts

If you have a concern or suggestion for improving the new electronic editions, please send them to JerryBellune@yahoo.com or call 359-7633.