We break the mold as a business newspaper and online news provider in many ways. Most just stick to business reporting.
We like breaking molds, disrupting. A newspaper should be a disrupter, shouldn’t it?
I think so.
And in that vein, we constantly strive to expand and enhance the content of our products. This current edition of the Business Press introduces two new wrinkles.
One is an evocative photograph. We’ve searched for a photographer who could provide us weekly photographic images that stir the soul, cause folks to think. In the 140-character world of Twitter in which we live we cling to the notion that a picture is worth a thousand words.
The photo shown here and on the Opinion page of the Oct. 9-15 issue of the newspaper is such a picture.
A friend of mine phoned me to ask if she could share a photo with me. She had just viewed it.
“Of course,” I answered. And why not?
“Because it made me weep,” she said. I looked at it and agreed with the photographer’s view that the image of tangled tree roots in the Rock Springs Woods section of Fort Worth’s Botanic Garden “looked like people running in panic.”
It was the day after the massacre in Las Vegas where a lunatic shooting from a hotel window sent concert patrons running for their lives, killing 59. More than 500 were injured.
I was captivated by the photo and contacted the photographer, an amateur who shoots for his own enjoyment. Turns out he has hundreds of images he will let us print. We plan to run one a week. If you have photos you believe we might enjoy showing our readers, send them to us.
The photographer wants to remain anonymous so we will only use the initials “KPW” in what we call the photo credit. He wants no pay for his work.
Also on the Opinion page and our website is an editorial. We have published occasional editorials in the past but we now plan to offer a weekly viewpoint representing the institutional opinion of the Business Press. The opinion will be hashed out by a four-member editorial board and the members will take turns writing the editorials. It is unlikely all four of us will agree entirely – or at all – with the positions we take but we will discuss the issue, vote, and majority rules. If the vote is 2-2, the publisher gets to vote twice.
Soulful photos in a business paper break the mold. Institutional editorials fly in the face of media critics who contend that readers no longer care what the newspaper thinks, institutionally or otherwise. So we’ll break that mold, too, and any other barrier that we believe needs breaking.
Richard Connor is president and publisher of the Fort Worth Business Press. Contact him at rconnor@bizpress.net