Our outdoors adventure picks up pace
In our area, the great outdoors provides abundant opportunities. It is why The Spokesman-Review sports department will now devote two publication days a week to covering outdoor activities.
Our awarding-winning Sunday outdoors section will remain in the hands of long-time Outdoors Editor Rich Landers. It’s difficult to imagine a more passionate, hands-on producer of a weekly section. Landers takes amazing photos, writes with authority, supervises the design of the section and usually writes the headlines. That’s pretty rare in our business.
Starting Thursday we will introduce a weekly section that will add stories and features to our outdoors coverage. We will also launch an expanded outdoors website.
In our Thursday section you will see feature stories on a wide variety of outdoor pursuits. Some of the stories will be about people excelling in these pursuits. Others will be instructional and still others will be about adventure. We will use our staff writers for some stories and enlist in a large pool of area free-lance writers.
Other content will include:
• Landers’ weekly outdoors column will move to this section;
• our weekly Fish and Game report by Alan Liere will shift to Thursday’s section;
• staff writer Mike Prager will give readers a heads up on the weekend weather in the area;
• our pick of “photo of the week” from readers;
• a calendar listing of coming events;
• Liere will write a monthly outdoors humor column;
• Bill Jennings will return with a weekly ski column, which will be replaced in the spring with Doug Pace’s area motorsports column.
All this and more will be found on our redesigned website (screenshot below), which will debut on Thursday at www.spokesman.com/outdoors. Our web team of Gina Boysun and Dan Gayle has done a great job of preserving the previous site and adding features to help readers navigate through the wealth of outdoors information. Readers will also be able to keep up on news in the outdoors with Landers’ popular blog and they will find useful links to outdoors resources. All of our reader-submitted photos will be viewable on the site.
Check us out in Thursday’s paper and online. If you have story ideas or other content suggestions, please feel free to contact me.
Take a bow
Staff writer Jim Meehan and columnist John Blanchette have been singled out in the annual Associated Press Sports Editor newspaper contest.
Meehan was named a Top 10 beat writer for his coverage of the Gonzaga men’s basketball team. Blanchette was named a Top 10 columnist.
Our staff was awarded a Top 10 Sunday Section.
All voting is done by a collection of sports editors from across the country and entries are judged against others in similar circulation categories.