Sixth week sweep | From the Publisher’s Laptop

By Christopher Spencer
Ozarks Unbound

This is the six-week mark for Ozarks Unbound.

Thanks to all who have read the stories we’ve written and welcome to anyone new checking out our site for the first time.

Please say hello to Kyle Kellams, news director at KUAF, who is leading this week’s Songbook. I think you’ll be surprised and pleased by his tune selection. It’s good stuff.

I’ve also decided to take Ink by the Byte to a weekly format rather than a daily missive. I deeply appreciate everyone who reads it – about 16 views of yesterday’s edition and as many 50 on some of them. It’s been fun trying to provide an editorial foil to the anonymous editorial writers at the three local papers – Who watches the watchers of the watched?

I still think a media critique column is a good part of balanced news breakfast.

I’m scaling the column back because it’s cutting into my time for developing original stories and writing news. On the average day, it would take me about an hour and a half to two hours to write Ink By the Byte. I’m slow sometimes. That’s time I should instead be writing the things I originally envisioned for the magazine like Open-faced Art, Portrait of an Artist or covering an important meeting as I did while I was a print journalist.

It’s also cutting into my time to learn and train on the alphabet soup of languages like HTML, CSS and PHP that allow for web design. I want to better understand how to merge the worlds of print journalism with online publishing.

I still plan to write a weekly Ink By the Byte column which will include highlights from the week’s editorials. You can expect the first on Sunday and every Sunday after that.

In exchange, my hope is you will see more original stories here.

As always, please direct any advice or rants or praises to me at cspencer@ozarksunbound.com

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