Here’s some happy news: Come August, we’re adding more than 70 pages of content a week to The Plain Dealer, including late sports scores and news, more national and international stories, and a lot more The hitch is that you will find that extra content only in the online version of the newspaper, not the printed version. It’s a benefit only for subscribers to The Plain Dealer – the print or online versions. We’ve talked here for a while about taking advantage of the virtually unlimited space of the online newspaper. Unlike with the printed edition, where the number of pages is constrained by cost, we can put as many pages as we want into the online version. Doing that takes staffing, however, so we’ve been working with our design team to find a way forward. The addition of content should be a hit with a lot of readers, because they email me regularly asking me for exactly what we are adding. Consider sports scores. As our budgets have tightened over the years, we’ve moved our deadlines for the printed edition earlier and earlier to gain efficiency in production and delivery. The earlier deadlines have blocked us from including scores for a lot of Guardians, Cavs and Ohio State Buckeyes games. That irks readers, who have been prolific in emails to make their grievances known. Until now, we’ve encouraged people to visit cleveland.com first thing in the morning to see the previous night’s sports coverage, as full access to our website is included in newspaper subscriptions. Starting in August, we’ll be able to include most scores and coverage in the online newspaper, along with more national sports content. I also regularly receive requests from readers for more national and international stories. We prioritize local stories in the printed edition, with a decent collection of the major news from elsewhere. Space does limit what we include, though. In the expanded online newspaper, we’ll have plenty of additional pages for news from beyond Ohio, as well as in-depth analyses of the news that do not fit in the printed edition. All of the extras will be in an added section in the online newspaper. Readers will still get the day’s entire Plain Dealer in the online version, but it will have an additional update section. The additional local content will be in the front pages, with the other material filling it out. Most days, sports will be on the cover. The overwhelming number of requests I get are about sports. On Saturdays in the fall, high school football roundups will lead the section on Saturdays, with more in-print roundups on Sundays. We’ll have an additional feature page each day based on music, food, books, health or science. During the week, we’ll also have a Your Money page. The back page of the update section will be a full-page prime time TV grid based on broadcast and streaming channels most aligned with our core readers. It will include college sports stations, like the Big Ten Network. The Sunday version of the update section will be bigger than the weekday sections and include two pages of opinion content, to augment our already loaded loaded Forum section, and weekly stock wrap-up packages. We’re also adding the four-page SUCCESS section from Tribune Media because it is full of great personal finance stories. As you can see, that’s a lot of extra content. We’re excited to bring it to you. The majority of our subscribers have activated their access to the online newspaper, but we think this extra section will convince them to use it every day. Some day, we expect, the economics of the printed version will bring its end, but the online newspaper offers the curated experience we’ve had all these years with the printed version. I know. I know. Some of you want only to read the printed edition. It’s still here. If you want some extra content, though, you will find it online. If you subscribe to the print edition of the paper (which is separate from a subscription to cleveland.com) you can activate your access to the online newspaper at https://myaccount.cleveland.com/ If you regularly pick up the print edition at a newsstand and want to get all the extra content coming in August, you can subscribe at https://subscribe.cleveland.com/ You have the choice of signing up for the print edition, which is delivered Sundays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays. Or, you can sign up just for the online edition, which is what I’ve done for more than a decade. I far prefer to read The Plain Dealer on a tablet, where I can make the type bigger and zoom in on the terrific photos. I’m at [email protected]. Thanks for reading. | 