We are stepping up our coverage of the pending March 6 local-option sales tax vote in the Cedar Rapids metro area, rural Linn County and Walford. We took a look on Feb. 16 at plans Linn County communities other than Cedar Rapids have if the tax passes there. This is a countywide vote, after all, [...]

[Updated Friday night, Jan. 17] If you are on Facebook check out a page called Gazette & KCRG Visuals. The site showcases the great work our photographers produce on a daily basis and also lets you know some of the interesting things they are doing. So few photos get published that it is a shame [...]

I wrote my Sunday Gazette column for Feb. 12 about a story Diana Nollen did about Hancher Auditorium’s efforts to present shows without a theater, the result of the Great Floods of 2008. Some stats popped out at me, such as a 65 percent drop in annual revenue from the year before the record 2008 [...]

“Can you put this picture in your paper?” a letter writer asked on a sticky note. There actually were two photos on a page to which the sticky note was attached: one showing Occupy Wall Street protesters and bearing the caption “Twenty-Year-Olds in 2011 Wanting Everything” and the other showing soldiers and bearing the caption [...]

I received a note recently from a Gazette reader who took issue with a specific “Bizarro” comic that ran in the paper on Jan. 19. I am going to mention the note in my Sunday, Feb. 5, column in the paper. This particular cartoon showed urinals and a punch line related to urinating — ” [...]

Other stories in this report: Public information board proposal to get full airing Despite attention to openness, problems exist Iowans in poll favor more effort into providing access Fight over Riverdale security video ends with payout   Last year the North Liberty City Council was working on a policy for dealing with open records that [...]

I received this e-mail on a Sunday morning a few weeks ago: We’ve noticed Leonard’s Pitt’s column missing from the Gazette the last few Sundays. We miss him. Is he on vacation or is he too left wing for the Gazette’s right wing sensibilities? Just curious. A short while later came this, from the same [...]

TheGazette.com has become livelier this weekend as a place to be informed and entertained, thanks to the addition of an entire features section on the site. It may be hard to believe but TheGazette.com has not had a features section. Sure, we’ve had Milestones and our HooplaNow.com sites, but not a rich variety of stories [...]

Jay Rosen, a New York University journalism professor who thinks and writes about journalism for the 21st century, and who is an advisor for the SourceMedia Group board of directors [* See note below] that oversees how this company that owns The Gazette operates, opines in his latest blog that news outlets have gotten away [...]

Updated on Monday, Jan. 9 Legislative leaders tell us they don’t expect a 2012 repeat of the drawn-out drama we saw in the Statehouse last year. Agreement on key issues early on could set a good tone for taking on other issues in the session, House Speaker Kraig Paulsen, R-Hiawatha, said in a story for [...]