Video

Independent-Mail President and Publisher Butch Hughes and Editor Don Kausler Jr. talk about the reader-friendly and environment-friendly new newspaper that the Independent-Mail will unveil on Tuesday, April 22: Earth Day. Watch »

The countdown continues. In two days (gulp!), Independent’s Day will arrive. A new newspaper will be unveiled.

Are you ready? Ready or not, we’re excited about presenting news in a dynamic new format. It will be a much more reader-friendly and environment-friendly newspaper.

Maybe you’ve heard. The Independent-Mail is going green. What does that mean?

Cynics will say the green we will conserve is money. We can’t deny eco-nomic motives.

These are challenging times. Before we decided to change our format, we discussed other radical changes. Eliminating one or more editions per week, laying off as many as 33 people, raising the cost of subscriptions … none of these alternatives was good.

So a switch to a more convenient format is our answer. The feedback we have gotten from readers at community meetings has been overwhelmingly positive.

The new format will allow us to conserve money by conserving newsprint. Next to people, paper is our biggest expense. The cost of newsprint already is up 25 percent this year.

We will save more than 1,000 tons of newsprint per year, the equivalent of 17,000 trees, or 26 acres of forest.

We have chosen Earth Day as our launch date. We will encourage more recycling, and we will make it easier to keep newspapers out of landfills. We are working with Anderson County to provide more newsprint recycling bins in the area. Please take advantage and get with the save-the-planet program, if you aren’t already there.

Meanwhile, we’re almost ready to unveil something else that is new and exciting. It’s the ultimate Earth-friendly move a newspaper can make.

How about a paperless paper?

Any day now, we will offer subscriptions to an electronic edition of the Independent-Mail, an e-dition, if you will.

Electronic? Yes, this newspaper already has a thriving Web site: IndependentMail.com. Much of the content you see in the newspaper can be seen online. In fact, we now publish on the Web first, then republish on paper. What you don’t see on IndependentMail.com are such things as comics, puzzles, syndicated material such as Dr. Gott and Dear Abby columns … and the printed ads.

In this electronic edition, you will see every page of the newspaper, ads and all. You can click through the “paper” page by page and click on any stories you wish to read. When you click on a headline, the text will appear in a large window. If you don’t feel like reading it, you can click elsewhere and have the story read to you … in one of many languages. (Southern drawl isn’t one of them … yet.)

I could tell you every detail, but you’re better off e-xperiencing this e-xciting news product. You can buy a subscription ($5.99 per month) or pay for a single e-dition (50 cents daily, $1.50 Sunday). We’ll offer free three-day trials.

Check it out soon. E-njoy. And to go green, keep the printouts to a minimum.