Change is inevitable. In fact we are hard-wired to adapt to changing conditions in our environment. If not, well, we die out or we become something entirely new (think dinosaurs and birds.)

The same is true for newspapers. I am not ringing the death knell of newspapers here, although part of that word, “papers,” is slowly disappearing. What won’t go away is the other part of that word, “news.”

Instead, I am writing about the way we gather and present the news. In my 35 years in journalism, I have witnessed and experienced and adapted to changing technology, starting wih the lowly and exasperating typewriter. Then there was the equally exasperating “optical scanner,” where corrections were typed in the line above and you hoped they showed up in the right place.

And finally there was the computer, a great leap forward in writing and editing copy and eventually in the way our words end up on the printing press.

Of course, all this went unnoticed by readers, who rightly only cared about getting the paper delivered on time and their name spelled right.

This also was before the Internet was a gleam in Al Gore’s eye, although maybe in the military’s eye. That gleam is now a bright light. Change, again, is inevitable.

Enter rentonreporter.com.

Many of you have already discovered our Web site. We hope more of you will do so as we move our resources into presenting the news of Renton each day online.

Think of it as your daily newspaper. We will do our best to meet your expectations. We have high expectations for ourselves, too. One is producing high-quality videos so you can not only “see” Renton, but hear it as well.

I don’t want to leave the impression that our Renton Reporter print edition is going to be left in the dust when we switch to a Friday publication in January. It’s not. We have gone multi-media and our print edition is a critical part of our commitment to presenting local news and advertising to you.

That won’t change.

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