Starting April 1, the readers of The Chicopee Herald, The Springfield Reminder and The MetroWest Reminder will have a new publication that is unlike any other weekly community newspaper in Western Massachusetts.

The new Reminder-Friday edition will combine the circulation area of those editions into one publication.

It will be the standard size of tabloid newspapers and will not be folded, allowing us to produce a newspaper with a cover with potentially more impact.

It will have much more of the look of a magazine than a standard newspaper in its design.

“The Reminder” will have some new standard features that will emphasize people in our circulation area through a community photo page, a profile called “Hometown Hero” and another named “A Day in the Life.”

Readers can nominate someone they know who is working for their community for “Hometown Hero” and someone who has an interesting but unsung life or career for “A Day in the Life.” Just drop me an email at news@thereminder.com.

We want to hear from you about the people you know who deserve recognition.  

Your opinions will be seen through our new “Speak Out” column, which has already started. Go to http://speakout.thereminder.com, sign up and start commenting.

My co-publisher Dan Buendo described the reason for the redesign in a way many people could understand: Do you drive the same car you drove 20 years ago? Has your house looked the same for the last 50 years?

Dan said, “Technology has drastically improved over the years. And our ability to create papers with more colorful graphics and creatively designed layouts has improved along with it. This new edition will reflect those new changes.”

Change in life is inevitable in most of our human endeavors.

Now, let me tell you what won’t change: our commitment to giving you the best weekly community news package we can.

Over the years, people have read us because we try to produce advances on events we believe will interest you; cover stories in depth; and do follow-up stories. This will not change.

It is gratifying to meet readers who express their faith in the newspapers we produce and that has occurred many times over the last 14 years I’ve been privileged to be managing editor.

And yes, we will have stories and features from our communities every week.

When it comes to the role community newspapers play in an area, I am amazingly old fashioned and corny – so forgive me or prepare to snicker. Americans need a healthy press to be better citizens. They need access to information that has been vetted. They need an effort to see multiple sides of an issue. That’s our job.

After all Thomas Jefferson once wrote, “The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. But I should mean that every man should receive those papers and be capable of reading them.”

Amazingly enough in the world of instant news, there is still room for publications such as ours. People seem to respond well to knowing ground-level news, the news about their community that will affect them first.

That’s what community newspapers across the nation continue to do.

Got a comment about this story? Go to http://speakout.thereminder.com and let us know.