Publisher Dan Goetz is out of town attending a special event and the rest of our editorial board is either busy preparing budget materials for next year or on vacation.

I could have just plugged in a “guest editorial” in this space. But then I thought about the readership surveys that have been flowing in — a little more than half of them have been returned so far — and the early results in some areas have certainly been eye-opening for us.

For instance, the favorite non-news features in the newspaper are this column, Curt Swarm’s “Empty Nest” column and the crossword puzzle. On the flip side, several “traditional” elements of the daily newspaper have been panned by our surveyors.