I see the need for our editorial pages, like the rest of the newspaper, to concentrate more heavily than ever on local, state and regional issues. This is where we can stake a claim like no other media can.

Our readers can go to many places to get informed opinion on the Iraq war or global warming. But there are very few places they can go for expert opinion on local issues. And that is where I want us to dwell, with the active participation of our readers.

It is true readers can go many places for informed opinion, but having lived in Minneapolis for 18 years, I can tell you there is a sensibility there that just doesn’t exist anywhere else. I would say the same is true in other places where I have lived, including New Hampshire (Live Free or Die), New York City, Allentown, Pennsylvania and now Marietta, Georgia. The Star Tribune is still the largest Minnesota platform to reflect that local sensibility, even when it comes to national or international issues. To take away that platform away, doesn’t enhance a sense of the local rather it diminishes it. Instead of seeing those national and international events through the sensibilities of someone who has her pulse on Minnesota, local people’s opinions will be informed by someone else, somewhere else.

Of course, this will be one more step towards making regionable papers even more irrelevant. The best writers and the most solid readers will continue to gravitate to the web. Maybe they’ll go to the Minnesota Monitor where former Star Tribune opinion writer Jim Boyd had his own say about the Star Tribune’s new policy.