New Sunday

DEAR READER,

Please doodle. Inside today’s Missourian you’ll find an insert with something editors generally don’t allow — blank pages.

I hope you will fill them. I’m not looking for great art here. Ask my colleagues and they will tell you my drawings wouldn’t compete with a kindergartner’s. My

10-year-old daughter sketches horses and dolphins that actually look like horses and dolphins. I don’t.

It’s OK if you want to stick with words — phrases, sentences, paragraphs, anything to describe what you want to see from your new Sunday Missourian.

In other words: Create.

Suggestions are, well, trickling in. Education, at all levels, seems to be an early topic of interest to tackle better. One reader, a journalism professor and longtime Columbian, asked for a kind of coverage that captures how we spend most of our daily lives by covering the way we work, or don’t work, in a concentrated way.

Most want us to go deeper — to find the issues and concerns that affect mid-Missourians and then delve into them, not simply skim the surface. That’s consistent with our aim to provide not just more information but more understanding about the world we live in.

That’s what editors here are trying to do. This week, John Schneller got passionate about the weather. He wants to create a feature that explains patterns in our weather from month to month and season to season. Reuben Stern and Mike Fuhlhage knocked around ways to capture the incredible creativity and culture that exists in mid-Missouri. Zeina Makky came up with a set of suggestions for how to make things attractive and easy to read.

They were simply building off others’ dreams for a new Sunday.

It’s a work in progress, but with a deadline. On April 4, we will publish a first draft of the new Sunday publication. We’ll get your feedback, make changes and produce another draft a month later.

The clock’s ticking.

Sincerely,

Tom Warhover, executive editor