Over the last few weeks, we’ve implemented several changes to our newspaper that longtime readers have likely noticed. We plan to continue bettering our product with several other changes in the near future as well.

First, I’m sure many have noticed we’ve removed the rail entirely from the front page of the newspaper. Although the rail was informative, it created creative problems when laying out the newspaper each day.

It’s important for the editorial staff to be able to shape the paper the way it needs to, based on the importance of a story or event.

This is hard to do when a portion of the front page is taken up by a sidebar every day, so we decided it was best to replace it entirely.

In its place, we’ve moved children’s weather to the bottom of the front page, along with the issue number, volume number and bar code. We’ve started a new feature, where we’ll look at what happened in Troup County years ago and feature this information in a few sentences at the bottom of the front page.

We’ve also added new stories, called standing features, that will be featured in the paper each week. Those stories will run once a week, on the same day each time, and will focus on a specific category. We will have the neighbor spotlight (Mondays), a business profile (Tuesdays), first responder (Wednesdays), art/music (Thursdays), education (Fridays) and veteran of the week (weekend editions).

Other big changes are yet to be implemented, but are coming next week.

The biggest is the addition of a records page. We’re still finalizing the design of the page, but the content will include arrest reports from the Troup County Jail, incident reports from both the sheriff’s office and LaGrange Police Department, and other records such as restaurant scores and marriages. We hope to add more of these records in the near future as well. There are many reasons why we feel these records should be published, with the most obvious being it is a public service to do so. Nothing is more important than public safety, many of these records are directly related to the health, wellness and safety of the community.

We’re working every day to improve our product and to do a better job of serving this community.

These changes will help us do that.