I would institute a renewed covenant with readers and advertisers along the following guidelines:
- Our recommitted focus will be on NEWS that’s intensely local; including major metro Tucson cities & communities, Pima County government, school districts, etc. and relevant items in Southern Arizona.
- We will focus less on Arizona state government. National & international news you can get on your own. No more ‘flying aircover’ for dirtbag local politicos & bureaucrats, idiotic policies, and their patently foolish underlying ideologies.
- There will be no more pandering to the political Hard-Left. Fitz, Steller, Spitz, Kornmiller are gone. “Pander-Pander-Pander” will no longer guide our editorial operating model.
- We will be unabashedly pro-growth for the Tucson Metro & Southern Arizona, but with a critical reverence to our unique urban, natural, and cultural assets.
- Local business news will receive just as high a priority as anything else we publish.
- We will give 100% balance to opinion-pieces & letters every day, as space allows.
- We will fire capable advertisers, who steadfastly refuse to utilize our new technologies for demonstrated better market penetration.
- We will restore Facebook interaction to all Internet news stories, but for subscribers only.
- Our sports section will be much more inclusive of all local school & community sporting events, and it will include fishing, hunting, and gun-sports.
- Our writing style will be news-specific; we will not be doing 1000+ word stories, where 250 words will suffice. We are a newspaper, both physical & Internet, not journalism school.
- We will deliberately list corrections, updates, mea culpas as quickly & openly as they can be verified. Our commitment to news-prep transparency is a key metric.
- We will publicly survey & list once a year an analytical grading of our writers, their assigned areas, most read reports & stories, lists of corrections, updates, etc. for our readers. This will be a key management tool.
- Finally, in all our writing & reporting we will diligently strive to eliminate judgmental condescension towards our readers. That said, there will be a daily section of balanced irreverent humor, as reparations to readers for decades of the aforementioned sanctimony & pandering.
Sellers is a South Park Republican who lives in incorporated Oro Valley. His background is federal tech-transfer commercialization. He is on Facebook.