Getting the newspaper from the slobbery mouth of a dog named Fido is no longer the only way of getting the news delivered to your living room.

Today, most newspapers bring the news to their readers through fresh and colourful web pages that often
feature other forms of media like video and photo galleries—those ways, and of course, through the traditional printing press. The Merritt News has been online with its new template since just before Christmas of last year and we haven't looked back since.

We are moving forward with our online source for news, sports, and entertainment because we see the trends in society and know that our younger readers get their information almost entirely online.

The traditional print edition of the Merritt News will still be available, and even better than before.

With our interactive newspaper design, we hope to draw in readers to our newspaper, then to our website, and back again to our paper.

The intention is to make the Merritt News media sources convenient and informative, but also to encourage participation by our readers.

With enhanced photo galleries, online commenting and community videos, we hope to cement our reputation among Merritt residents as the best and most up-to-date source of news. For you social networking junkies, we have Merritt News Facebook and Twitter pages.

But more than that, we want to provide a means of communication for the community.

You already know about our weekly community events listing. We want to make this even better, so we have made it possible for our readers to post their non-profit community events listing through our easy to use “Events” web page.

It's as easy as navigating to merrittnews.net, scrolling over the “Community” header, and clicking on events. On this page, you will find a large red button that says “Submit Your Own Events.” We encourage you to use this. We encourage you to post comments on stories that interest you. It's your community and you have a right to speak out on issues that matter to you. Also, look for small square tabs embedded in the body of stories in the print edition of the Merritt News. These tabs will let you know if there are online videos or photo galleries related to a story, and when the story first appeared online.

We may be a weekly newspaper, but we have a daily website. Currently, there is a fresh story posted online every day at merrittnews.net.

Another part of our recent webprint dynamic is our readers' poll. Our weekly streeter question is now linked to our online poll. We post the opinions and photos of three people from the community. Then we ask a similar question on the online poll. The poll results are online, but they are also posted in the following week's print edition on the opinion page below the streeters section. Everybody gets their say.

Having a website as interactive as merrittnews.net is great, but we will always give our print edition as much care and attention. We hope that between the two of them, we can become a community hub and bring the community together more.