Open Writing

In closing, I demand an explanation, an apology.

So we take your phone calls, answer your e-mails, post comments on blogs and speak to community groups.

Yet on any given day, we have direct contact with only a small portion of our readers, who are busy with the hectic pace of modern life.

We've come up with a way to make it easier for you to let us know what you're thinking.

We logged and analyzed hundreds of calls, letters and e-mails from readers and stashed them in a database. We extracted the most common topics of concern, enabling us to produce this convenient feedback form.

We look forward to hearing from you.

This is a new era for newspapers. We're no longer confined to the printed page and no longer held hostage by production cycles. Thanks to the Internet, we can bring you the news as it happens.

I can't point to a more dramatic example than Friday, when we covered the tragic shooting death of California Highway Patrol officer Earl Scott.

Scott was ambushed during a traffic stop on Highway 99 near Ripon at 4:40 a.m. that day, a time when our newsroom usually is closed. But reporter Chris Togneri and photographer Bart Ah You found out about the shooting and rushed to the scene from their homes.

While thousands of commuters were stuck in colossal traffic jams because investigators had closed northbound Highway 99, Togneri was piecing together details of what happened. Ah You was snapping pictures. Editors called in for early duty began planning our coverage and writing our first story. We posted it on Modbee.com at 7:40 a.m.

It would be the first of many updates we would file to the Web that day. Not only did we file stories, we posted several photographs and audio clips from a news conference.

There was another dimension to our coverage on the Web: enabling our readers to share their feelings.

We set up a forum on Modbee.com where several people left comments expressing their horror and sadness at the killing (and at least one vented frustrations about being stuck in the resulting traffic).

We also established a "guest book" where people could leave their remembrances of Earl Scott and offer condolences to his family. Dozens of people from all over California and from several states had posted comments within a few hours of the shooting.

You can expect more of this round-the-clock, interactive coverage from The Modesto Bee and Modbee.com.

Our normal pattern is to post all stories from the newspaper to Modbee.com early each morning. But we don't stop there.

On most weekdays of late, we've been posting two or three fresh stories to the Web site during the day and evening. For example, we broke the news Tuesday on Modbee.com that a Green Beret from Turlock had been killed in Afghanistan. We followed up with new developments, then put everything together in a comprehensive report for Wednesday's newspaper.

We're looking ahead to the day when we'll be posting video from valley events to Modbee.com.

We encourage you to pick up The Bee every day to get the full complement of news, features, sports and advertising. And we want you to turn to Modbee.com at all hours for the latest breaking news.

Either way, we'll keep you posted.

At the same time, editor David Fagan revamped the newspaper's website, making it the most reader-friendly of any in this country. It now resembles the Modesto Bee's website in many ways, presenting all the day's news and features, plus breezy blogs from the editor and several staff members, who invite readers to add their comments.