Craig Franklin:

Warren G. Bennis once said, “In life, change is inevitable. In business, change is vital.” When our family purchased this newspaper back in March, we knew that according to all statistics, a major investment in the newspaper industry was a step of faith. For the past several years, our industry has taken some huge hits and thousands of small town, weekly newspapers have closed due to one major mistake – failure to adapt and change.

My dad knew this as well which is why he continually progressed with the times during his 54 years as publisher and editor. The modern style of printing was easier to come by for him than the new digital, online age. Still, he advanced this newspaper into the online scene and set the stage for the future.

As we were preparing to purchase this newspaper earlier this year, we did a hard examination of the paper’s current status and where we knew it had to get to in order to not just survive, but thrive in the current economic and industry climate.

I’ll be honest with you…the easiest thing for us to have done would be to simply keep things as they were. Continue with the same format, the same layouts, the same everything and business would have continued based upon the success, achievements and name of Sammy Franklin. The easiest thing for us to do was to do nothing.

Operating under the achievements of my dad would have lasted for a while but we knew that for real, substantial growth, we had to come to terms with the hard facts of where society is as a whole. More and more people, young and old alike, are moving totally digital as our smart phones, tablets and computers make it easier to navigate the information highway.

We knew we had to not just have this newspaper become relevant with our black and color ink pages, but we had to reinvent ourselves with a vibrant online and social media presence. We had to drive up our website views in order to compete with other news sources and provide a valuable asset for advertisers in addition to the print version.

I share all of this personal information with you because you, the reader, are the primary reason all of this change is occurring. It’s not just about allowing this newspaper to succeed, it is so LaSalle Parish continues to have a reliable source of news, sports and other community events for future generations. All one has to do is talk with communities where they no longer have a newspaper. As one person put it, “When our (small town) newspaper closed, it was like the death of a family member.”

Can we even imagine what LaSalle Parish would be like if there was no newspaper? How would people keep up with public meetings? What a difference it would be not looking each week to see the past week’s sports stories and photos? How would we know what our politicians are doing with our tax money or if they are living up to their promises? What would it be like to not see editorials and features of local residents? How would we know of new businesses or great deals from our hometown merchants?

And so, these past few months have been a continuous series of events that have ushered in change for your local newspaper to ensure we are here for a very long time. Most everyone has recognized the different layouts and designs, the increase in local content and even the larger assortment of advertisers, but some really big changes are occurring in our digital arena.

During the summer, we had many discussions with our online media company, eType Newspaper Services of Texas, about how we were wanting to expand our online presence and all of the ideas that we had to allow our viewers online to have a more pleasant and interactive experience.

It didn’t take long for e-Type’s president, Thad Swiderski, to see that what we were wanting to do wasn’t possible with the version of online newspaper software we were using. He recommended that we change our software altogether to the most modern and advanced program in the industry: Tecnavia. This is the same newspaper program that runs the Wall Street Journal and other major national newspapers and locally, the Times-Picayune and the Advocate.

It took several months to build our newspaper in the Tecnavia software but a couple of weeks ago it was completed and we made the switch to the new program.

As with anything new, there were some glitches. One of those had to do with our subscriptions as we had to change over to a completely new system to incorporate the Tecnavia site. In the process, some issues have occurred but we believe those have been resolved.

The most obvious issue in the changeover had to do with our e-editions that are sent out via email every Wednesday morning. A few of our viewers reported issues in regards to the opening and operation but as with the subscriptions, we believe all of those have been resolved.

With the old version, viewers simply opened a pdf file of the newspaper on their phones, tablets or computers. The new version actually takes the viewer to the website, which allows a whole new world of interactive viewing. Articles are able to be clicked on and brought up the front and even the jumps that are sometimes several pages away are part of the enlarged article. It also connects photo galleries to stories and so much more.

The problem is, people in general do not like change. The new format does require learning to navigate the site and some people simply don’t like the change.

For many years, I had an old school cell phone. It was referred to by my kids as the “Jitterbug,” in reference to a phone advertised on TV for older residents. My phone basically had one function – calling. It could text but why in the world would I text when I could simply call someone?

But eventually I had to get a new phone and I purchased one of the latest iPhones. At first, it was a nightmare. I couldn’t do anything on it and even calling someone was a chore as I tried to figure out what to touch to get a keypad on my screen. I had to take the time to learn the new phone and today, I can’t even imagine not having my phone where I can call, text, check and send emails, search the Internet, take pictures and so much more.

So, as we work to provide you with the most advanced smalltown newspaper in the state, we only ask that you bear with us through all of the “new.” We promise, the last thing we want is to cause you problems in viewing this newspaper. All of these changes are being performed in order to make sure we are here for a long time and you have the highest quality newspaper as possible, whether you view it in print or online.

An anonymous author once penned: “If nothing ever changed, there’d be no butterflies.”

Thank you, LaSalle Parish, for bearing our many changes. We are praying the end result will be a beautiful butterfly!