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Margaret Hair

Margaret Hair's column appears Fridays in the 4 Points arts and entertainment section in the Steamboat Today. Contact her at 871-4204 or e-mail mhair@steamboatpilot.com.

Steamboat Springs — For the five years I've been reporting for arts and entertainment outlets, everything I've done has been on a weekly cycle.

In college, that meant marathon Tuesday-night production and design sessions, putting together a section of concert reviews that might be more than a week old, movie reviews for films that came out the Friday before, and CD reviews of albums that were released the previous Tuesday.

At internships, it meant watching our arts editor stare madly at a computer screen for something like 18 hours in a row every Tuesday night and Wednesday morning.

And for 4 Points, it means writing a budget for the Friday section about a week in advance and spending the first three days of the week producing content that might not be fresh by the time it gets to you.

A&E weeklies have been my favorite part of the newspaper for years, but I have to think the magazine-daily newspaper hybrid we're working with stunts the ability to provide current, engaging arts coverage.

You can get around that roadblock in a lot of ways - almost all of them lead to the Internet. Online content provides opportunity for sound clips of a band that's playing in town, video clips of events or rehearsals, photo galleries of art openings, and most importantly, up-to-the-minute coverage of arts and entertainment in Routt County.

For larger newspaper models, the answer has been to continue printing a weekend arts section and pair that content with a music blog, features in the daily newspaper, an online events calendar and anything else you can think of. For the Steamboat Pilot & Today, we're going to have to get more creative with our resources. We might have to look at the old way - the weekly cycle that produces a full-fledged 4 Points - and let it go.

As the newspaper looks for ways to provide up-to-the-minute content online and in-depth coverage in print, 4 Points is looking for a way to cover the arts in a way that is relevant, interactive and useful.

Online, that could mean a more accessible events calendar that's updated daily, event previews that run a few days in advance of an event, multimedia clips, concert reviews and more live A&E coverage. That could be fleshed out with reader-submitted reviews and comments about concerts, movies or visual art events.

In print, that could mean a modified weekend arts section that still tells you what's going on in music, art, dance, film, theater and community events. That section could be shorter; it could run in the Friday edition of the Steamboat Today. If that happens, the change would provide the time needed to produce arts content for the Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday newspapers.

Whatever changes we consider, you're going to be the people most affected. 4 Points exists to tell its readers what's happening in arts and entertainment in Routt County, and we're interested in feedback about what kind of coverage you'd like to have, and how you'd like it to reach you.

More coverage of concerts and other events? Previews that run a few days in advance, to give a chance to buy tickets? Multimedia content on an A&E Web site?

Send your suggestions to me at mhair@steamboatpilot.com, or call in with your thoughts, 871-4204. While we're gathering input about how to reinvent the way we do A&E at the Pilot, look for Twitter updates about events around town on the "this just in" tab at the top of www.steamboatpilot.com.