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.