You may notice a slight change in today’s edition of the Sequim Gazette. For some of you, it’s a significant one.

No, your paper did not shrink, nor did it lose a section (not completely). In the ever-changing effort to balance production costs and news content, we’ve packaged our B section (sports/recreation and schools) along with our C section ("Strait Scenes"/arts and entertainment) into one section.

It’s called "Community," a broad term for sure. It consists of those items previously featured in the two sections mentioned above and it allows us to feature the people and places makes our Sequim-Dungeness Valley truly unique.

"Community" has a slightly different front-page design. Our local sports scene and schools are featured inside. In order to avoid conflicts between our avid arts and sports/rec readers, we’ve essentially made the sports section a four-page pull-out (pages 5-8). 

We’ve also taken our crossword out of the mix. For some of our loyal readers, this cuts deep — but by removing the crossword we are able to bring back much of the local content we’ve trimmed in previous weeks. Since reformatting the paper in the last six months, we heard from many of you that want more local content, particularly in our community calendar. 

So why the change? Despite cutting expenses in all departments, the Sequim Gazette (like nearly all local and regional businesses) hasn’t seen the fruits of a rather slow economic recovery. Combining sections saves a great deal in printing costs. This change retains what our readers value: our local news, features, sports, school news and more. 

We welcome any constructive comments, critiques and considerations.

Reach us at news@sequimgazette.com.