Column: Evolution, tip lines and summer living

I know we live in Northern Ontario and winter is supposed to be our time to shine, but I’ve a confession to make: I’m not a winter guy.

Maybe it’s because I’m sub-cutaneously challenged (read: gaunt as all get-out) or because I don’t enjoy winter sports either recreationally or as a fan. Winter to me is a long, dark, long, unforgiving, long, and just too darn uncomfortable to be enjoyed.

Winter is something to be endured, as far as I’m concerned.

But summer, well, summer is when I really come alive. I love the heat; I revel in the humidity; I bask in the UV-rich rays of the sun.

And while Vacation Mark loves summer, Work Mark longs for the busier days of fall, spring and (sadly) winter. Summer, particularly July, is a slower time for news. Everyone’s on vacation, so it’s hard to find sources for stories.

Everyone’s at camp, so every beat slows right down to the point where reporters (and editors) rack their brains to find things to write about.

Normally, I open my inbox at work in the morning to find at least 100 messages awaiting me from the night before. This morning, I think I had 40. As I said, everything slows down.

The slow down though does provide a little time for reflection, which is always nice (and necessary). Today, I was reflecting about life on the Internet.

For regular readers, this won’t come as a surprise, but for those of you who wait until Northern Life arrives at your home to catch up on the news, I encourage you to pay a visit to our website, NorthernLife.ca.

Back in the spring, we made some changes to our newsroom and our news cycle. The web really is the future of everything and as we adapt to this new reality — where everyone wants to know everything and they want it at their fingertips as quickly as possible — community newspapers have to make a sea change to keep up.

Community papers have fewer reporters and editors on hand than the big papers, but our readers have just as much hunger for new content as anyone else, and that makes it a real challenge to meet reader needs in this new digital world we inhabit.

To that end, we expanded upon our digital first policy and NorthernLife.ca now features new content every hour of our publishing day.

That publishing day grew, too, by the way. We post our first story at 5 a.m. and continue throughout the day, posting our last news item for 10 p.m. We’re providing more stories, more videos, more columns — more “content” (the new buzzword for “stuff you can find on a website”) than we ever have before.

What you will find in one issue of our print edition is about half of what you’ll find on the website on any given day.

To help us get there, we created a new position of associate content editor (the ACE we like to call her). Long-time reporter Heidi Ulrichsen brings years of experience to filling that role. We’ve also brought in Mississauga boy Matt Durnan to fill the role of night desk reporter. After several years reporting in the Prairies, Durnan’s back in Ontario where the skies are smaller and cowboy hats are just a fashion statement.

It’s all part of Northern Life’s continued evolution as a community news provider, one of the last independent newspapers of its kind in Canada.

In another smaller, but important, change, we launched a news tip line on July 24. You’ll find the phone number (705-673-0123) at the top of every right-hand page of the newspaper, and on the right at the top of the homepage at NorthernLife.ca.

If you see news happening, please don’t hesitate to call in your tip. Keep it brief, but describe the incident, as well as where and when it occurred.

Tips can be anonymous, but it would be helpful if callers left a contact number in case our reporters need more information.

Well, that’s about it for me. I’m taking the next week off to enjoy some of this summer weather while I can.

Winter will be here before we know it.

Mark Gentili is the managing editor of Northern Life and NorthernLife.ca.