Some readers expressed concern when we dropped The New York Times news service a few weeks ago.

I wanted to assure you that there are still plenty of sources from which we get news beyond that gathered and presented by our own staff of about 100 journalists.

First there is The Associated Press, which employs 4,000 people in 235 bureaus around the world. It also has access to all the news from the 1,400 US newspapers who are part of the cooperative and from news clients worldwide.

We also subscribe to The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times wire service. These major national papers have large staffs here and in bureaus around the world and give us deep East Coast and West Coast sources.

Then there is the McClatchy Washington Bureau, with a national staff of 23 reporters and editors; seven foreign bureaus (in Baghdad, Beijing, Cairo, Caracas, Jerusalem, Moscow and Nairobi), and 12 regional reporters and editors, including Les Blumenthal, who reports for The News Tribune and the other McClatchy papers in Washington state. McClatchy newspapers also have access to the coverage of the Christian Science Monitor bureaus in Mexico City and New Delhi.

We also receive news from the McClatchy-Tribune News Service, which provides material from the thousands of reporters and columnists at the 30 McClatchy newspapers and nine Tribune Co. newspapers nationwide, plus about 40 other leading news organizations including The Dallas Morning News, The Philadelphia Inquirer, the San Jose Mercury News, MarketWatch, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, The Orange County Register, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and The Seattle Times.

We even have a news service that focuses on business news. Bloomberg News covers business and economic news around the world. It covers all of the public companies in Western Washington, including some that no other services cover. The service has more than 2,300 reporters and editors in 135 bureaus around the world.

The same day President Barack Obama ordered a rollback of government secrecy, he also stepped into mess.

On Wednesday, three news agencies refused to distribute photos of President Obama in the Oval Office for the first time. The photos were taken by White House photographer Pete Souza. The Associated Press, Reuters and Agence France-Presse photographers were not allowed to capture the president at work on his first day in the Oval Office, long considered the president's public office and generally open to some news photography.

Michael Oreskes, managing editor for national news at the Associated Press, was quoted as saying, "We are not distributing what are, in effect, visual press releases." The AP also rejected a photo of Obama re-taking the oath of office that was taken by Souza.

So how did The News Tribune obtain the photo, and why did we use it when other international news agencies refused?

Independent news coverage is very important to editors at The News Tribune. When other photos are not available, we will occasionally use photos from "official sources" such as the White House, Boeing, the NBA, etc.

On Wednesday afternoon, our wire editor Jonathan Nesvig, AME-Visuals David Montesino and I (photo editor) had a conversation about the boycott and whether to use the photo or not. We decided that it was a historic moment, with mood and significance. It's unfortunate that independent news organizations were not able to take photos of the same moment. Without an alternate source, we decided to use the photo to mark the day. The photo was distributed internationally by the McClatchy-Tribune News Service (MCT), a division of The News Tribune's parent company.

Dozens of newspapers across the country (newseum.org) made the same decision.

On Thursday, the AP, MCT, APF and others photographed the president extensively as he signed an executive order to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay.

The idea behind today’s front page was to capture the grandeur of the moment. It was a moment, I believed, that transcended personality and plays into the hope of a nation. We had to convey the ascendancy of America’s first African-American president as much larger than Barack Obama — that his selection was the choice of a nation.

The choice of our lead image on the front page shows Mr. Obama taking the oath as president, not as the central figure, but rather as part of a much larger idea — that idea being the United States of America. In this moment, the capitol dome represented that idea elegantly and succinctly.

We, in the newsroom, spent a great amount of time debating how to appropriately capture the moment. This was not a unanimous decision but rather a product of numerous discussions, disagreements and skepticism over whether we were doing the right thing.

In the process of designing the front page, we had to think beyond the moment and think about what the moment represented. We knew we would not satisfy everyone’s idea of what the right thing to do would be. We just had to make sure that we did not fail to represent the larger picture.

On Monday, we began using a Sudoku puzzle provided by a different vendor. Instead of four levels of difficulty, now there are three. And the new puzzle box is slightly smaller in the paper than the old puzzle.

I got this note from a sharp-eyed reader today:

"I would like to complain about your smaller version of Sudoku. Many of us who work this puzzle are senior citizens and we do not need something smaller. Would you please consider going back to the original size?"

And my answer:

"I’m not yet a senior citizen, but I still think you’re right – our new version of the puzzle is too small.

"I talked today with the page designer who coordinates that page. She plans to contact the company tomorrow that puts all the puzzles on the page for us and ask that they bump up the size.

"Because they work a week or so in advance, it will be several days before we can make the fix. If I find out this is not possible, I’ll let you know.

"Thank you again for making a suggestion that other readers likely will appreciate, as well."

We often host visits by students, civic groups, church groups, etc. Today, we were visited by Jennifer Streun's first-grade class from Whittier Elementary School in Fircrest.

The first question from a student: Why is your building so big?

Page designer Carmen Dybdahl showed them how she moves photos and stories around a page on her computer as she decided how to present the news. And graphic artist Fred Matamoros showed them the magic he performs with illustrator programs and such.

And, of course, any visit requires a trip to the other side of the big building to see the presses. Even us old kids still sneak down there to see that every now and then.

If you're interested in arranging a visit for your class or group (or even individuals), contact Grace Ryan at 253-597-8632 or grace.ryan@thenewstribune.com.

One of the fun parts about this job is talking to the community about journalism. TNT readers love their paper and aren’t shy about questioning us and demanding improvements.

Sometimes we take our show on the road. Tuesday night, I led a presentation to about 100 folks at Chapel Hill Presbyterian Church in Gig Harbor. My wife, business reporter Kathleen Cooper, helped facilitate the exercise I created called “How to Build The Front Page.” We explained how the newsroom’s reporting and editing process works, including an explanation of the TNT's philosophy of local news first and other priorities that guide our decisions.

Then we distributed a list of nine stories and a packet of photographs to tables of 8-10 people each. The stories contain a mix of local, national and international topics covering such areas as the economy, crime, breaking news, war and a good-news feature. Each group had about 15 minutes to build its own front page of five stories, including selections for a lead (the one with the big bold headline) and a centerpiece (the one with the photo).

The point of this exercise is to show that news decisions are a human process, and different groups make different lists for different reasons — few of them more or less valid than the others. It’s a lot of fun, and it usually leads to laughs and thought-provoking discussion.

After the exercise, we took questions from the group about our readership and our business’ future — a topic that has made national news itself recently. The group was thoughtful and insightful about how people of a certain age read the paper and how times are changing.

We publish an invitation in the paper for readers to attend one of our afternoon news meetings, where we make the Page One decisions every day. You’re welcome to attend: Call Grace Ryan at 253-597-8632 to schedule a time. And if you’re interested in the road show, call about that too. We bring our own supplies and don’t have any groupies — yet.

A redesign of thenewstribune.com launches at 2 a.m. Wednesday. The culmination of about nine months of work, the new design offers a better display of homepage and section front items, and introduces the Pluck commenting system.

Our site will be off line for a short period early Wednesday morning as we make the shift.

The new home page will keep a large photo anchored at the top of the page, which we think is an advantage over our current format that stacks breaking news updates at the top, pushing the photo farther downpage all day.

We'll still be breaking news all day long, but beginning tomorrow we'll make it clearer which of the updates are big news and which are lesser news.

Casual readers shouldn't notice a change in the commenting process. Most registered users shouldn't be phased either - their comments will show under each article. Comment threads will not carry over from the old system to the new one.

We're also launching the vMix online video platform and a major revision of the photo galleries, powered by SlideShowPro.

VMix and SlideShowPro facilitate collaborative, high-volume, quick-deployment production environments - important for online breaking news.

There will be a button on our homepage tomorrow which you can click to log comments on the redesign or let us know of any problems you see.

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Update at 2:37 p.m.

The Private Message functionality is not a feature of the *new* Pluck commenting platform. We're lobbying for that feature to be added on future software updates. - Doug Conarroe, AME-online

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A handful of readers have written this week regarding our coverage of the fighting between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza area.

Here’s a portion of one email: “I note your bias toward the Palestinians, whereby you have published several stories about the impact of the Israeli airstrikes but virtually nothing about the impact of the many rockets fired by Hamas from the recently awarded lands that Israel gave up to the Palestinians.”

This story is another one that falls mainly to our wire editors. For the past week, since this last round of violence began, on most days the bulk of the news stories and pictures have been about Israeli bombs dropping on Hamas targets. As of Friday, the United Nations reported more than 400 Gazans killed and four Israelis.

We cannot ignore telling the news as it happens.

But what we can and should do is be sure each of those stories contains the context of why Israel says its striking out against Hamas – because of Hamas rocket attacks on southern Israel.

Our stories this week have included that context.

On Tuesday we ran two stories on the conflict, one noting the United Nations’ tally of civilians killed by Israeli bombs and another detailing Hamas rocket attacks and offering a slightly longer look at the conflict.

On Wednesday, we covered the story locally when about two dozen people carried signs in front of the US District Courthouse in Tacoma protesting Israeli strikes. Our reporter also talked to the lone person at the protest defending Israel, and he sought out members of the local Jewish community who did the same.

In a 10- or 12-inch daily story, we are not able to retell the entire history of MidEast violence, but we’ll continue to do our best to provide some context.