Pardon the mess as S-R reconstructs

Normally, the passing of a big election is a time of relief and relaxation for me.

The endorsements are behind us. The tasteless campaign ads have ended. The avalanche of letters to the editor subsides.

We who toil on the opinion pages usually take a minute to reflect on the results, then we get to exhale and turn our attention to other matters.

That’s all still true, but this year those welcome developments are tempered by unpleasant realities.

As you’ve probably heard already, The Spokesman-Review is contending with the same economic and technological pressures that are afflicting newspapers across the country. The result, summed up in a word: downsizing.

Because of the pressures listed above, we were spared the impact of staff cuts until now. But beginning Monday, we will be a leaner staff with less space to fill. Lynn Swanbom, our amazing letters coordinator, will depart. Associate Editor Rebecca Nappi will move across the firewall to the newsroom where she’ll write about social services.

Associate Editor Gary Crooks and I will soldier on, wondering in our new solitude if our deodorant failed.

But the impact of all this will affect you the reader too, in a variety of ways. While some of the changes will be worked out over time, here’s a preview of what we know now:

Op-ed pages. This page, the one we label “Roundtable,” will continue on weekends only. On Monday through Friday, there will be just the Opinion page (as has been the case on Mondays for some time now).

Letters. Since letters to the editor have traditionally appeared on the Roundtable page, we will have less space with which to accommodate the volume of readers’ comments we’ve published in the past. As a practical matter, that won’t be much of a factor now, since the flow of letters always drops off sharply after an election and stays fairly light through the holidays. But over the long haul, we’ll publish fewer letters.

Columns. We’ve been reviewing the selection of syndicated columnists we publish. We expect a few changes in the next few weeks. Such workhorses as David S. Broder, Leonard Pitts Jr. and Kathleen Parker will still be seen, among others, but we expect to shuffle the rest of the deck. For your comfort and our convenience, we’ll stick to a routine as much as circumstances allow. Broder will appear Thursdays and Sundays, for example, with similar schedules for other regulars.

Smart Bombs: If you noticed that Brother Crooks’ irreverent reflections were missing from their usual corner of the Opinion page today, please don’t call to ask if he was finally fired. He is shifting to Sundays.

Cartoons: Some readers may recall that a few years ago we published a weekly cartoon gallery as a change of pace from the customary syndicated columns. It’s baaack — or at least it’s on the way. Look for it Mondays, starting Nov. 17.

That pretty much covers what we know now. But there will be additional fine-tuning, and we’ll try to keep you informed as we go along.

In the meantime, as the sign says when you walk through an airport during remodeling, “pardon our mess.”