Column: How about an entire edition of nothing but good news?

The other day I ran across a reader callout from a GateHouse Media newspaper for Thanksgiving.

It was from The Repository in Canton, Ohio and they were asking readers to send in stories of what they're thankful for. This may sound quite familiar as the callout they have in place is one of 18 that are recommended as part of Web Cube. Click here to download the teaser.

Here's what The Repository said to readers:

Thanksgiving is a time for thanking God for our many blessings. Why not share a story with us about one blessing that you've been thankful for over the past year?

It might be a loved one, a friend, neighbor, co-worker, or even a perfect stranger who has done you a kindness. Or it might be everything surrounding a blessed event — a wedding, a birth, a new house.

They asked readers to submit their stories in 200 words or less.

I bet that the newspaper is going to get an incredible reaction to the callout. How could I be so sure? Experience.

A few years ago, while serving as editor of a group of papers in Western New York, we were struggling with what to do with our Thanksgiving edition. The holiday was about three weeks out and I mentioned during a planning meeting that we needed to start considering ideas for that day's edition and the day after. I wanted to avoid a typical Thanksgiving paper.

To my shagrin, the typical stuff got tossed on the table:

• A story profiling one of the soup kitchen workers who was serving meals on T-Day
• What the economic impact of the day-after T-Day looked like for merchants

Fine stuff. Pretty standard though.

I was new to the paper and had invited the publisher to sit in on the meeting so he could see the process we were going through when planning content (and the T-Day one so far wasn't anything to brag about). As the staff looked bored and ready to close the book on another typical Thanksgiving edition, the publisher looked up and said, "what about an entire good news edition."

"An entire edition of nothing but good news," I asked somewhat sarcastically.

"Yes," he said. "Nothing but good news."

He looked at his Blackberry, got up and said "good luck, look forward to it." Oh, how we've all been there.

With a new staff staring at me with puzzled and confused looks on their faces, I looked up and said "we can do this and we should."

The concerns from the staff immediately poured in:

• Were we not going to run police reports, because that's not good news?
• What about obituaries? It can't be good that someone dies
• What if there is a fire on the day before Thanksgiving? Are we not going to cover it?

Fair questions. We agreed to not run police reports unless something major happened and would run those Wednesday reports in Friday's paper. We would call obituaries "celebrations" and if there was a major news event we would run it, but find a corner of that day's edition to anchor the negative news. And we would inform our readers in a column from the editor and publisher about our plan and how we would deal with that negative news.

Hands down though, the biggest concern surrounded how we would actually come up with an entire edition of good news.

And then a smart reporter spoke up: "What if we ask our readers to write this edition for us."

Great idea.

We agreed to use readers to help us fill this good news edition and created a promotion in the paper and online and ran it on the front page for 10 straight days, asking readers to tell us what they were thankful for. There were no ground rules — a big mistake when it came to the length of some of the entries we got — and we encouraged photo submissions. Not knowing how many submissions we would receive we planned several stories like: 10 reasons we love living here, features on folks who had left the area earlier in their career but came back to retire and a piece on a judge who had a big heart during a snowstorm for several folks who got parking tickets. It wasn't difficult to come up with the ideas.

And the reaction from readers concerning the callout we put in place was unbelievable. We got 1,500 inches of submissions. Some stories were simple thank yous to neighbors, others were thankful to be alive after surviving horrific events and others were just thankful for their country.

The responses filled eight of our pages on that Thanksgiving edition and by some good act I can't explain, no major negative news hit our community that Wednesday. Actually, at 5 p.m. on Thanksgiving Eve, news broke that the city would receive millions of dollars from a pact with a local tribe that had built a casino in town. Nothing could have been better to lead our paper the next day than that story.

Papers flew off the rack the next day, likely because so many readers wanted the keepsake edition. It's not every day that 50 of your readers have their stories published in their newspaper.

I don't share this story because it was the most innovative idea, but because it hits at the heart of two really important conversations: Readers want to read about good news in their community (and not just on the back of their Lifestyle section on Sunday) and they want to be involved with their newspaper.

Readers need to feel a sense of ownership with their hometown newspaper. There's the obvious stuff like always being on the lookout for their interests and covering topics that connect and appeal to them. And our newsrooms accomplish that goal on many days. The other piece to reader ownership focuses around their involvement. The reason the Good News edition was a success — and why it sold out across the city — was because it was our readers' paper that day. It was filled with their stories, their photos and their moments. It belonged to them.

How often can you say that about your paper? When I was an editor, I know that wasn't something I could say daily.

It all starts with a mindset that readers are important. We all say it, but how many of us actually practice it? Making reader involvement stick takes more than a callout once a month for a few photos. It takes an understanding that readers deserve to have their content displayed in a prominent format and most importantly, that they are always being asked to share their thoughts, stories and commentary on issues that touch their lives.

Reader involvement can't start and stop with letters to the editor, submitted press releases and photos of kids dressed up at Halloween. You have to take it further. The Thanksgiving Good News edition was a good start for my former newspaper, but we needed to build upon the wild reaction we received from readers and should have understood that we needed a place daily for their stories and news and moments. Sure we had community and education pages where their content lived, but we needed daily scrapbook pages dedicated to their writings and art work. We needed to realize that their stories and opportunities to involve them in their newspaper needed to be just as important as how we were going to cover that Tuesday city council meeting.

For readers to have a true stake in their hometown newspaper, they need an open door to participate on the pages of your paper and web site every day, through callouts they see daily and moments of surprise when they are asked to submit something they weren't expecting.

The feeling that readers had that Thanksgiving Day when they picked up their paper — that this was their paper — was something I wanted to capture every day. I hope you have that same goal every morning when you walk through the doors of your newsroom.

David Arkin is the executive director of the GateHouse Media News & Interactive Division. Contact him at darkin@gatehousemedia.com