Change. Change. Change. If there’s one thing people resist in a news platform it’s change, and we have a change coming.

This column, however, is about more than mechanical changes we occasionally make in our presentation. It’s about the philosophy of change.

First, the mechanical. I’ve written previously about the added Update section in the digital version of The Plain Dealer, included as an benefit for newspaper subscribers. Our print edition has space limits, but the digital realm is open. Last year we added Update to include overnight stories and sports scores. Personally, I love the content mix, as do many readers who have written to me. 

I can see in our metrics, however, that about a third of the people who read the digital edition don’t get to Update. We suspect they don’t know it is there. Or they finish the comics and forget it is there because the comics were always the last thing they read.

We aim to make sure everyone is aware of Update by moving it closer to the front page. Later this month, Update will become the second section you see in the online newspaper, in front of sports, comics, puzzles and the like. It makes sense because Update is more current, meaning more newsy. The news should come first. 

We have a profit motive. We believe more people will remain subscribers if they read Update, but they will do that only if they are aware of it.

It’s a change, so I surely will receive a stream of complaints. I get it. Many readers abhor change. They like the comfort of tradition. They want to return to the days when we delivered a newspaper seven days a week with a page structure and comics lineup that never varied. We can’t do that. The economics of our industry don’t allow it, and what’s more, we should always be assessing what we do and trying to improve. Which means change.

OK, it's time for my annual woodworking analogy. I’ve been a woodworker for more than 35 years. It’s a good break from my day job. I mainly use traditional hand tools, like planes, handsaws and chisels, because they are quieter and provide a workout. 

A key to using hand tools is sharpening. A sharp tool is safer than a dull one because it does what it is supposed to, through finesse instead of brute force. I learned sharpening early, using traditional Arkansas whetstones with a little oil on them. Over the years, I tried other methods, but I stayed with the oilstones.

I devoured many woodworking magazines as I was starting, and new on the scene back then was a made-in-Sweden sharpening system that used a low-speed grinding wheel dipped in a small water tank. The water prevented sparks that could ignite fire in a woodshop and prevented the tool’s steel from overheating and becoming soft. The woodworking magazines lavished praise on the Tormek system. The cost was high, however, so I harrumphed and haughtily convinced myself that old ways are best. I stuck with my whetstones.

Step forward three decades, and I’m a woodworker with some painful arthritis at the base of my left thumb. Anyone who has seen me in recent years knows I wear a leather brace on my wrist. It works about 99 percent of the time to prevent my thumb from bending to a quite painful position.

When I sharpen tools, however, the strain on the arthritis builds. These days, sharpening more than a couple of tools means my hand aches for days. Hoping to extend my woodworking years, I recently broke down and bought a Tormek sharpener. 

I immediately felt like an idiot. Because I resisted change.

The Tormek is fast and simple to use, almost foolproof. If I had bought one decades ago, who knows how much time, and in recent years pain, I might have saved myself. It is far superior to the traditional method I’ve long used. I avoided change to my detriment.

We do that in newsrooms all the time. We avoid potential innovations. We resist re-examining our practices and methods. How many times have I heard a variation of “because we’ve always done it that way?”

When we push through that resistance, we find success. For four years, we’ve been producing daily podcasts on sports, news and, recently a weekly dining podcast. (DineDrinkCLE is great fun.) Podcasts changed us from people who could take the time to polish our written thoughts to people speaking extemporaneously. That was scary.

But podcasts opened up new audiences for our content, with listeners being far younger than the people who read the paper or visit our website. They allowed our audience to get to know our team more intimately, through the human voice, which builds a better relationship with you. They also generate some advertising revenue to pay for our journalism. Embracing the move into audio has been an absolute win.

We think our next frontier might be in television production. The content we produce involves subjects that fit cleanly with what you find on many streaming networks, including sports and true crime. We’re exploring partnerships to bring our content to a much wider audience, in new-for-us storytelling forms on your screens. This kind of thing can make us uncomfortable, because it is way out of our traditional element. 

It’s change.

We have to embrace it. We have to evolve. After a decade of forcing ourselves to do that, we are, at last, a sustainable newsroom, meaning we generate the revenue we need to produce our content. If we keep doing that, we can grow our revenue enough to expand the topics we cover. 

I was a fool to eschew the Tormek for my sharpening. In our newsroom, we can’t be fools about adopting new practices, ideas and storytelling forms.

We have to change.

I'm at cquinn@cleveland.com

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