By Paula O’Kray

I’ve debated with myself about writing about this, but I think it’s important that I do. About a month ago the Gazette made a big decision it’s been considering for many years.

After a lot of discussion and weighing the pros and cons, the Gazette decided it was time to discontinue the TV listings. It did not come easily, and the decision was not taken lightly. None of the decisions at the Gazette are ever taken lightly.

A bit of background here. We are a very small business that is owned by a small group of people, most of whom are your neighbors. We are not affiliated with any other newspaper and never have been, although we do get calls from people who assume we are, and make some odd requests. We generally ignore that, as we just want to be helpful, and give our time to these callers as if they were our regular subscribers.

Some of those owners are employees too, and spend a lot of their time making sure we keep offering a quality product to the people of Portage County and subscribers who live outside of the area. Our staff is very small, and we all wear many hats here to keep things running smoothly.

We do it because we love the Gazette. We love the idea of providing an excellent source of journalism to the residents of our community and beyond. We put in extra hours and go above and beyond, because we simply want to. Our hearts are in it, and we want the people who read the Gazette to be entertained and well-informed.

We have staff meetings occasionally throughout the year and generally discuss how things are going, but we are always talking about how we can improve and make our paper better. We look at what other similar papers across the state are doing, and talk about what works, what doesn’t, and what our readers want to see and read about.

Our decision to drop the TV listings was debated at these meetings on and off for years. Many times the discussions ended in a stalemate. However, with the advances of the Internet and television services that provided their own local listings at the touch of a button, and much more accurately at that, papers across the nation decided one by one to stop providing something that was available in so many other ways. We held on so long that we were one of the very last to still be providing them.

What our readers may not have realized was how expensive it was to provide them. Our staff doesn’t simply copy and paste them from the Internet. The TV listings are a costly service by a third party, and with the changes in our local economy, it became necessary to seriously consider if it was absolutely necessary to keep them.

We don’t like change here at the Gazette either, but sometimes hard decisions have to be made.

We gave our readers a month’s notice of our decision, and stopped publishing them at the beginning of October. During that time we received a lot of feedback from readers about how they felt about the change. We listened and kept track of each and every response.

What really broke our hearts though, were those who claimed that the listings were the only reason they bought our paper. And while that might be true, it’s really amazing how they missed what we consider the best parts of our paper.

The Portage County Gazette is an award-winning paper, and has been for many years. Each year we take what we feel is our best work and submit it to the Wisconsin Newspaper Association’s statewide competition each September, and each year we win several awards.

The awards are for various aspects of good journalism and newspaper design. Not just our articles are submitted, but also our photographs and even our advertising. None of the awards are for TV listings.

The Gazette staff felt that we could improve our paper by replacing the listings that can be found everywhere and instead offer even more of our award-winning content, of which we are very proud.

Of course, there are services available that provide “canned” articles, photographs and ads, but we don’t use those services to fluff out our paper. That would be unfair to our readers, who graciously spend their hard-earned money for our product.

We put in content that was generated right here, by our staff, local writers and community organizations. People who know Portage County and live and work among you. People who understand what the issues are in our community. People who share the struggles and the joys of what it means to live in Portage County.

In short, it’s a paper written for you and about you. But we’d like to take it a step further. We want your input, folks. We want to know what you want to read about. What do you want to know more about? Are there local people in the community whose story you’d like to hear?

Send your suggestions by email to [email protected] We look forward to hearing from you!