We at The Chronicle are absolutely blown away by how many of you took the time to share your thoughts through our readers survey.
The industry average for survey return rates is about 5% — our survey yielded more than 25%.
The sheer volume of survey responses is sincerely appreciated. Assistant Editor Lacey Storer and I are currently going through each one individually to tabulate and analyze the data (a bigger task than we anticipated). Once all the information is logged, we will be able to use a random generator on the list of responders’ names to determine the three raffle winners.
In the meantime, I want to address a few recurring comments/suggestions that we’ve seen in the surveys so far.
Our publication schedule
As much as we would love to return to weekly print issues, it is no longer financially viable for the newspaper to continue. Despite this, we will continue the tradition of print media for as long as we can, printing every two weeks and working hard to provide quality content.
We are constantly thinking of ways to improve our online issues (published in between each print issues) and website, and we will keep you informed of upcoming changes.
Each paper’s timeline
In the interest of transparency, I’d like to explain the timeline for each paper’s creation and publication. This hopefully will help clarify the reasons for our deadlines, mailing situation, and timeliness of stories.
The deadline for each issue of The Chronicle is Thursday at 5 p.m. the week before that issue is printed. For print weeks, the main priority on Fridays and Mondays (and occasionally Sundays) is editing community submissions and laying out the print issue. This is often handled by one or two people at most.
On Tuesdays, the files for the print issue, mailing labels and information for the post office are sent to a printer in Columbia, Missouri. From that point forward, the papers are out of our hands and in those of our printer and the post office.
On Wednesdays, the papers are delivered to the main post office in Kansas City, Missouri, and begin getting sent to regional post offices across the metro area and nationally. By nightfall on Thursdays, ideally, most local readers should have received their papers, but staffing issues with the postal service and the low priority it places on periodicals occasionally delays papers a few additional days.
If you repeatedly don’t receive your print issues, please contact us. We will do what we can to ensure you receive a print issue.
In short, there are a lot of steps and processes involved in creating The Chronicle, and this hopefully helps explain why we can’t get yesterday’s news in today’s paper.
Content-related comments
We want to thank those of you who took the time to provide constructive feedback about content in the comment sections of our survey. We are already thinking of ways to incorporate new and varied content based on your suggestions.
Many of you have sent us articles from other publications, asking us to reprint them. We appreciate you thinking of The Chronicle when you read these articles, but we can’t always run them. Even if we include attributions, many publications (especially national or global ones) are often protective of their content and might not give us permission to run their stories.
We thank our fellow Jewish community newspapers — especially the St. Louis Jewish Light and Omaha Jewish Press — for their openness to occasionally share content with us.
We want to stress that we are always open to look at story ideas, article submissions and respectful op-eds written by community members. Information about community news submissions can be found at kcjc.com/current-news/submit-a-community-story, and information about editorial submissions can be found at kcjc.com/opinions/letters-to-the-editor.
We promise to continue to update you and be transparent about the results from our survey. Please keep an eye out in future Chronicle issues for more information, and feel free to reach out to me at with any questions.
Thank you,
-Sam
