My column last week, in which I asked for feedback on what we could do in our print product to help make it more appealing to our customer base, generated a substantial amount of response.

For me, it was encouraging to see there's a strong interest in improving our publication and newspapers in general. The fact that people care gives me hope that the print newspaper industry still has plenty of relevance. My worst fear, that no one would be moved to offer comments, did not come true.

So with that said, I'd like to move on to some of the observations you shared.

The criticisms were blunt but fair. We had a decent number of conflicting complaints - one reader would blast a specific feature in the paper and another would praise it. But there were also plenty of common themes.

Someone suggested we invite people from the community to an event to offer us advice, an idea that has great potential. We'll definitely be looking to organize something like that in the coming months.

In the meantime, I urge readers to keep the conversation going with your e-mails, online comments, old-fashioned letters or even phone calls my way.

In that spirit, I'd like to expand upon one criticism that multiple people lodged after last week's column: The Citizen does not do a good enough job with national and world news.

I understand this criticism completely. We've made a conscious effort at this paper to emphasize local news, sports and features first; then focus on state news; and then fold in national and world news.

Our general thought has been that most people don't look toward their local paper for national and world news. Television and the Internet seem to be the primary place people turn, and if they want print content, they look to a national newspaper, such as USA Today or Wall Street Journal.

But perhaps that assumption is wrong.

I'd like to hear more thoughts on how we should handle national and world news. Currently, we typically devote one or two pages in the back of the B-section to this content. We only put stories from beyond New York on the front page when it's a major news story, or when it's a painfully slow day for local and state content.

To those of you who want better nation/world coverage, let me pose these questions:

€ Should we be putting these types of stories on the front page more often, instead of a state or local story? We're always going to have front pages that are predominantly local, but perhaps it makes sense to include the biggest story from beyond this region each day, too.

€ Do we need more nation/world pages, or does what we have now simply belong in a different part of the newspaper?

Give me your answers, and please explain your thinking.

The goal is a better overall product, and the key is collecting good information from the people who make the decisions about whether or not to buy the paper.

Executive editor Jeremy Boyer's columns run Saturdays in The Citizen and he can be reached at 253-5311 ext. 231 or jeremy.boyer@lee.net