This morning The Gazette introduced its new Viewpoints web page, which includes some not-good-enough-for-the-paper web-exclusive opinion pieces (the first an anti-tuition rant from McGill student union types) and a link to Editor-in-Chief Andrew Phillips’s Ask the Editor blog (which now has real posts).

The paper devotes its entire op/ed page today to a massive guide to the website, for those readers too Internet illiterate to navigate a web page properly.

The web page still needs a bit of work (some links aren’t working yet and I caught a lorem ipsum on one page), but it’s a step in the right direction.

One less sexy change which readers will appreciate is a new layout for the editorials and letters page. The change is simple: instead of putting the Aislin cartoon above the letters, it will go above the editorials. That will mean letters take up a full half of the page, and there will be two editorials a day instead of three (a number I always thought to be a bit too much if you want to make profound statements with each one). The immediate result of this is that the paper will be able to print longer letters (take, for example, this one) instead of hacking everyone’s arguments down to bite-size 35-word paragraphs.

(Full disclosure: I’m a copy editor at The Gazette, but I didn’t edit the op/ed pages, so don’t blame me if you found a typo there or you think your letter was badly edited)