Arts & Life... now including feature stories!

One thing I’ve been hearing a lot of around the office these days is, “Hey, Alex, where are the feature stories?”

I have to admit, I have not done the best job of injecting the Arts section with feature stories since I took over in August. Perhaps the biggest reason for the lack of features is because of the immense popularity of our columns. In making new designs and more prominently featuring them on the back page, the section has ignored some of the better features we could have run.
This is all going to change really soon. Don’t worry – we’ve got a lot (and I mean a lot) of feature stories on the way in the upcoming weeks and months that I think will really appeal to our readers.

Speaking of improvements, we are also working on new ways of bringing out fresh takes on our current columns. Your favorite columns will be seeing some more festive outings (like the Halloween edition of Hautey Toddy) and more personal takes on the topics (like Alex McAdams’ top 10 indie songs list this week in iWeekly).

Now that I’ve plugged the section enough, I’d like to share one thought on The DM office that you may not believe: we really are trying to put out the best paper each and every day. The quality of my section and the paper as a whole may see good days and bad, but it does not change the fact that we really strive to put out content you, the reader, will enjoy. I normally would not reference all of this a lot, but after last night, I feel like I need to.

Halloween is one of my favorite days of the year, so when I realized that in addition to my classes, I was going to have to go into work on that day, I got pretty annoyed and depressed. I got carried away and began to rush through my section with the goal of getting out as soon as possible. About half way through this, Marti, our editor, came back, put her hand on my shoulder and says “How’s it going?”

She began looking over my pages and giving me tips. I realized while we were doing this that, despite the holiday, we still needed to put out a quality paper the following day. Marti understood this better than I did, but it just goes to show you that we’re not thinking about ourselves when we put this paper together — we’re thinking about you.

I hope you enjoy the section in the weeks ahead!