Crowded house

UPDATE: The State of the Town address is on. It is scheduled for 6 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 24, at the new Orange County Senior Center.

As I mentioned last night, we had to squeeze some things tight and squeeze some things out for this week's paper. We usually have several recurring items in the paper which, when added to the advertisements, give us an idea of what sort of space we are working with for a given week. Many of these have been mainstays long before I began working here, but I was hoping for some feedback of what readers find most useful. Some of them are:

Page 2 — Crime reports (Town Crier): We make it a point to report crimes that have occurred and arrests/summons that have been made in northern and western Orange County. We collect reports weekly from the Sheriff's Office and the Hillsborough Police Department, and we fit them in however we can. Citations are not reported largely because of space.
In recent months, the number of reports in the paper has been on the rise. This can be attributed to the holidays and the economy or because of increased communications between law enforcement and residents. Both are likely responsible, HPD Chief Birkhead said earlier this year. Regardless, it means that an increasing amount of our P2 space is devoted to publishing those reports.

Page 3 — Word on the Street: From what I hear, this might be the most widely-read item, week to week. We've had weeks where we can only fit 7-8 days of events into the entire column, so we try to place event information elsewhere in the paper on weeks when we can't get 10-14 days into Word.

Page 4 — Perspective/Pie Chart: We'll be working to include more people and less of a giant pie chart.

Cartoon: We have been using cartoons of national interest by Andy Marlette, nephew of the late Doug Marlette. While we appreciate being able to use the cartoons, the idea of using reader-submitted photos or the work of a local cartoonist has been discussed. There's certainly a lot of talent in Orange County, so we'd love to hear from any local cartoonist interested in producing a current events series.

Floating elements — Pet of the Week and Rabies Watch: These are in-kind elements that we publish weekly (or, with the Rabies Watch, when they occur) through our relationship with Orange County and private animal services groups. The Rabies Watch tracks where and when incidents occur and is used by the Animal Services department in their reports once we've published them.

As always, I welcome your thoughts.