David Trinko: What you say vs. what you do

Sometimes what someone says he wants doesn’t necessarily match up with his actions.

For instance, I keep saying I want to lose a little bit of weight. My clothes are a little snugger than they ought to be, and I don’t have the energy I want to have. Yet whenever I’m offered a bowl of ice cream at the end of a long day, I seldom say no.

My actions don’t match up with my intentions.

I’ve been thinking about this a bit in the past week, as I tried to understand the results of a recent survey we had about the columnists offered in The Lima News.

There are some columnists readers say you really, really hate. Yet, according to statistics of what you read online, you keep on clicking on them every week.

Fortunately, it wasn’t ever our intention to elect a homecoming king and queen here. This wasn’t a popularity contest.

I’ve told the people who asked that we won’t be revealing the exact results of the survey. It’s information to help us make informed decisions, especially in light of the retirement of longtime syndicated columnist Leonard Pitts. (He probably wouldn’t have won any popularity columnists locally, yet many of you read him regularly.) Several other columnists also moved from twice-weekly columns back to once a week.

You’ll see some changes based on that information in the next month. It starts with Dr. Jessica Johnson, an Ohio State-Lima professor, becoming a weekly columnist every Sunday. Your positive feedback and her consistently good numbers online made that a change worth making.

A few new syndicated columnists will join the regular rotation soon, based on your feedback of who you said you’d like to see. For many of you, I’m sure these will become your new most hated (and most read) columnists.

We’ll continue to provide a variety of opinions from a variety of viewpoints. It’s important for you to read both people you know you’ll agree with and people you know you’ll vehemently disagree with on a regular basis. Challenging your viewpoint is an important role of a newspaper’s opinion page.

Sometimes their viewpoints aren’t going to be popular. Then again, you’re not going to feed your children only ice cream simply because that’s what they say they like.

Besides, that ice cream-only diet would just be another action pushing me further away from my own good intentions.

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David Trinko is editor of The Lima News. Reach him at 567-242-0467, by email at [email protected] or on Twitter @Lima_Trinko.