Karrine Brogoitti

Ken Blanchard, known best as a business consultant, management expert and speaker, has been credited for a quote that’s floated in and out of my head on many occasions over the course of my newspaper career.

“Feedback is the breakfast of champions.”

It’s taken on slightly different meanings over the years, but the foundational message has resonated and stuck with me like a nice, hearty bowl of oatmeal. Just as breakfast is said to be the most important meal of the day (ask any mother or grandmother), feedback from our readers and the communities we serve gives us the opportunity to take stock of our operations and our coverage and ensures that we’re putting our valuable, but limited, resources and energy into what matters most to you. Not into the things that we think matters.

A well-balanced breakfast helps refuel your body and mind, restoring focus and helping lift your mood. Your feedback serves a very similar purpose for our business and our shared community. When you’re hungry, it’s more difficult to perform at your best. Likewise for the Baker City Herald. News organizations like ourselves “starve” without the fuel of input from readers — operating in a vacuum and limiting our opportunities to improve and enhance our news and advertising content.

Very recently, we conducted a survey of the Herald’s readers, asking them to provide us with feedback (oatmeal) on various aspects of the paper, including questions about what topics interest them and what types of stories they would like to see more or less of. We also posed scarier questions (What could we do better? What are we missing from our content?), hoping we’d get some honest responses.

And we did.

The valuable input you shared breathes new energy and focus into our newsrooms and gives us a roadmap for future features and stories. Based on your candid suggestions, constructive criticism and a slew of heartfelt compliments, we’ve already added resources and energy into expanded business coverage — both new businesses and features on existing businesses, as well as local reactions to wider business trends. Many responders said they’d like to see more stories related to news and topics impacting our smaller communities, and we agreed. You’ll see enhanced coverage and stories from the outskirts of Baker City in print and online and so far, readers are enjoying it. We’re looking forward to delivering more of what you’ve asked for in the coming weeks and months. I hope for some, you recognize these enhancements as something you yourself indicated as important or overlooked when contributing to our survey.

A very special thank you to our print and digital subscribers who were willing to participate in our survey and to share the good (and oftentimes great!), the bad and the ugly. And to those of you who weren’t part of our May reader survey, consider this your personal invitation to reach out to me with your own “breakfast suggestions.”

If feedback is indeed the breakfast of champions, the Baker City Herald is eating like a king.