There were lots of activities in Wise County over the weekend, and photographer Joe Duty did his best to get to a lot of them. You can check out his images here.

I headed over to Paradise Saturday morning for the Paradise Main Street Festival to see the dedication of the new Paradise Veterans Memorial Park. Other than a bit of a breeze causing a few of the flags to topple over a couple of times, the ceremony went off without a hitch. I was really impressed with the amount of people who attended the dedication and the festival. Events like these really help you gain a sense of “community” that you don’t always see as much as you used to. For some very amateurish video of the festival shot by yours truly, click here.

Joe was in Paradise, at the Wise Regional Health System Harvest Health Fair, the Decatur Chamber of Commerce auction, the 4-H Explosion and Sunday’s benefit concert.

We’ve got another big weekend coming up. Bridgeport is having its annual Coal Miner’s Heritage Festival, and there are plenty of events scheduled throughout the day. The final Cruise Night on the Decatur Square is also Saturday.

We here at the Messenger pride ourselves on trying to be as technically savvy as possible. We’re working as hard and as fast (as deadlines will allow…) to make WCMessenger.com even bigger and better. We’re posting to Facebook virtually every day, and our Twitter following has now grown to 176 (thanks everyone for the follows!). Flickr will (hopefully) be the new home to the photography of the great Joe Duty and everyone else here on staff, and our YouTube channel is getting lots of hits.

And now we’re working on something new that will hopefully take our flagship online product, Update, to the next level:

http://www.wcmessenger.com/update/beta/

This new format will allow for bigger photos, larger video, improved RSS feeds, social-networking integration, and… wait for it… wait for it… reader comments!

It’s still a work in progress, but if anyone gets a chance to check it out and give us your feedback on it, please contact me at webmaster@wcmessenger.com

Again, this is a pre-launch beta, so you won’t find a link to it on our homepage just yet, but it is live and active, so if you feel like it, please try reading Update this way if it suits your tastes.

Thanks everyone for reading!

Todd A. Griffith
Webmaster/Production Manager
Wise County Messenger

If you own an iPhone, be sure to check out the fine work of Web master Todd Griffith. He recently finished designing a Messenger Web site for iPhone users, iwcmess.com. Let us know what you think about the new Web site. We love feedback. For other phones, you can go to wcmess.com to get your news on the go.

Your Wise County Messenger won sweepstakes again at the Texas Press Association’s Better Newspaper Contest awards ceremony Saturday in Austin. That is the 10th time in the newspaper’s history and eighth in a row dating back to 2002.

The Messenger competes in the large semiweekly division.

It was truly a team effort. Photographer Joe Duty received first place awards for sports and feature photography and a third in news photography, reporter Mandy Bourgeois received first in feature writing, sports editor Robert Morgan received first place in sports coverage, reporter Travis Measley received third place in column writing, I received second place in editorials and headline writing, production manager Todd Griffith and paginator Keri Willerton received third place for page design, Griffith won first place for best web site and the advertising and production department won first in advertising. The Messenger also won second place in general excellence.

The 825 points we received toward the “sweepstakes” count was more than any other paper received, including the daily categories. The total is the third highest we’ve received in the eight years.

Publisher Phil Major’s previous paper, the Clay County Leader, also won sweepstakes in the medium weekly category, and he received a first place for news photo.

The awards are nice, but it doesn’t mean much if we aren’t providing our readers with the content they want. So always feel free to let us know if you like something or not or if you have any suggestions on how we can improve.

Production manager and graphic artist Todd Griffith has put together what we hope will be a useful tool for Wise County motorists. As I mentioned in a post below, we’ve started putting traffic reports in the Sunday paper complete with a map. Now we have the map online, and we will be able to update it throughout the week as we learn of new traffic conditions.

As always, reader input is welcomed. The online map has a place where you can report road conditions you come across. Let us know what you think of this new tool and any suggestions on how we can improve.

Stephen Colbert

Among the several journalism publications I receive regularly is the bi-monthly International Society of Weekly Newspaper Editors. The publication always has a journalism-related quote on the front page, and this month’s quote comes from the host of show that is a guilty pleasure of mine: Stephen Colbert of The Colbert Report. The phrase was no doubt uttered at some point during his satirical show. Here’s his take on the state of newspapers:

“The impending death of the newspaper industry: where will they print the obituary?”

Ironically, the obituary page might be the last place you will see cuts from newspapers. They are traditionally one of the most read pages in the paper. Newspapers can change up their paper’s format, but they’d better think long and hard about making changes to obits. Even on our Web page, if you look at our most read stories each week, you will normally see at least one or two obituaries.

Here’s a copy of an e-mail I got from a reader last month regarding obituaries: “I wish the Messenger would tell more obituaries earlier. I don’t get my Messenger until one day later and after 3 o’clock in the afternoon — too late for me to know who and more about deaths in our town. The information about funerals and family are too late to attend. Please put the obits earlier in the update.”

We do, of course, list funerals in the Update Monday through Friday. As one familiar face in the Messenger is known to say, “I had to look at the Update to see if I was in there.”

Find peace any way you can in the face of road work.

We kicked off a new feature in the paper Sunday that we hope readers will find informative. We are trying to compile information about road construction or maintenance projects, or any other situation where traffic might be impacted, throughout Wise County. The plan is to publish a map each Sunday for the traffic situations motorists might expect for the coming week.

I’ll also try to put the report in written form in Monday’s Update.

Of course, as we learn of traffic situations, we will post them on Update as well throughout the week.

But we also need your help. You can help be our eyes on the road. If you come across a road construction project, road closure or other traffic situation we might have missed, let us know. Call or e-mail news@wcmessenger.com.

We’re also working on getting the map on our Web site that we can update as we hear of road situations.

By the way, the photo above was taken a couple of years ago in a construction area near New Fairview, I believe. The man striking the Lotus-like position (no doubt on a dare from photographer Joe Duty) is reporter Brandon Evans, who has been gone for a year but plans on returning to the Messenger this July. It will be great to have Brandon back - let’s just hope Joe doesn’t have him sitting in the middle of too many roadways.

After a three week absence, the comments are back on our Web site, and I’m glad to see it.

We have added a few rules that will be enforced. Our publisher Phil Major wrote a column in last week’s paper explaining the need for civilized discussion.

I think getting reader feedback is crucial to a news organization. Commenting on stories helps us know if we are doing our jobs to the best of our abilities. And it leads to news tips. Unfortunately that tool can be used to hurl insults at other people. That is why we’ve taken the steps we have to encourage the constructive discussion and curb the destructive discussion.

You will now be asked to provide your name, phone number, e-mail and hometown. Also, all comments will have to be approved before they are posted, so comments will not be instantly available after you post them, but we’ll do our best to have them up as soon as possible.

We’re hoping we’ve found a successful formula. Only time, and our readers, will tell.

By the way, it looks like the Fort Worth Star-Telegram has used the word “civility” with a revamp of its rules for letters to the editor, according to this editorial published Sunday.

Regular visitors to wcmessenger.com may be asking what has happened to the ability to comment on our news items. The comments have been taken down until further notice.

Our story posted last weekend about the arrest of a Chico High School senior for aggravated sexual assault of a 13-year-old student at the school drew a flood of comments on our Web site. Healthy discussion is a good thing, but the majority of comments that followed the story were at times vicious and added nothing to the discussion. We’re talking about teenagers, people. Sure, it appears several made some very poor choices, but what does it say when the adults start acting with even less maturity than the kids - slinging hurtful words with the cloak of an “anonymous” or made up name to hide their identity? What does the community gain from that? That kind of discussion may be fine for personal bloggers, but not for a community newspaper.

I think the ability to post comments on stories is a good thing. It’s the same reason we’ve set up this blog - to help increase communication both among readers and between readers and the newspaper. My hope is that we can come up with a system to return comments to our Web site, perhaps with some sort of registration system.

In the meantime, if you want to comment on one of our stories, you’re going to have to do it the old fashioned way - write a letter to the editor (Note: we don’t publish anonymous letters, and we have certain guidelines we enforce). Those letters are always welcomed. You can e-mail them to me (news@wcmessenger.com) or fill out the form on this Web site.

Matt Brown, left, and Eric Davis rock the Messenger studio.

When we started incorporating video into our editorial products last year, we saw it as a way to provide breaking news video. Our breaking news videos have been the most popular of our videos based on the number of hits we receive. We’ve also had success with our sports highlight videos.

We are starting to incorporate video into our feature stories more. The story in today’s paper gave us an excellent opportunity to pair video with a traditional feature story in the paper. Travis Measley’s story on two Boyd High School students who won a band contest for playing heavy metal music on guitar was great on its own. But we also had the young musicians come to our studio where they played the music that earned them the gold. I hope readers take the opportunity to visit the video after they read the story. It’s one thing to be able to describe the music in words, but its something else to be able to hear it for yourself. You can also hear the two students talk about their music and the contest.

The use of sound slides has also been a way to enhance the feature story experience for readers. Perhaps the best example of this was the feature on bowyer Mark Horne. That allowed us to use Joe’s excellent photos and the audio-gathering and editing talents of Andrew May to create a story separate from the feature we ran in the paper. As with the guitar players, the audio allowed readers to hear the person in his own voice.

We’d love to hear feedback on what you think of our story/video pairing.