Erik Emery lays out a nice case for why The News Tribune should add "Tacoma" back into its flag (and name). He wisely ties it into a pretty vibrant conversation at Exit 133 on the demise of the American newspaper, a topic that has been appearing on various blogs and business web sites for about 10 years now. (The drumbeat is louder these days, of course.)

I'm not about to pretend to have any influence here regarding changing the name of the news organization. And I can see both sides. As our editor Zeeck pointed out, staking a claim to an area that includes all of the South Sound made sense from a business and marketing perspective in 1987, and still does. But, as Emery points out, in the digital age, when search powers the web, the lack of "Tacoma" in our name hurts our Google Juice score.

In fact, Emery's example of the U.S. Open was an actual conversation in the newsroom here the day we broke the news. Several people asked me why our story wasn't coming up first on Google News that day when they searched for "U.S. Open Tacoma" because the story was "ours." Well, Google didn't know the story was "ours" and we didn't have "Tacoma" in our headline, our URL or the title of our site. Our headline was "U.S. Open Championship coming to Chambers Bay," which made perfect sense for our local audience. If we had written "U.S. Open Championship coming to Tacoma" our local readers would have laughed us off State Street. (Doesn't the Trib know Chambers Bay is in UP?!)

So, since we can't use "Tacoma" in most of our headlines without looking silly to our local audience, adding "Tacoma" to our name, URL and flag would definitely increase our search performance. Would that bring enough page views (aka advertising inventory) to make it worth the expense of new signs and stationary? And the potential alienating of our suburban markets? That's a question for someone above my pay grade, but the web certainly has changed the dynamics of the argument.

The question of how we will survive in the future remains an ongoing challenge, of course. Online readership is robust – we grew 36% in 2007 and matched that rate in the first quarter of 2008 – but can we find new ad dollars online as fast enough to make up for lost ad dollar in print? That's the challenge. The only sure thing is that newspapers will have to change on every front – news, advertising, online – to meet that challenge.

Let's just say it's not boring around here these days. ;)