For more than 150 years, The Daily Citizen has been serving the community with news coverage of all of White County. As the times have changed, so have the staff. With a new publisher, Harry Porter, The Daily Citizen’s readers can expect to see some changes in the near future.

“My biggest goal is to open up the newspaper to the community,” Porter said. “We want the community to engage with us.”

Porter said he thinks much of the interaction with the community could be done digitally.

“Whether it’s posting comments on our website or comments on our social media site or interacting with us by sending us pictures of events or student happenings at Harding or Arkansas State University we want that information, we want to put that information out so that the community can be tied closer together because an informed community is a bonded community, and that’s what we’re looking for,” Porter said.

Some of the changes will be seen online, as The Daily Citizen will implement new features that include videos, podcasts and a shift in the content shared on social media sites. The logo will be redesigned, and many of these changes are taking place under the supervision of Porter who invites readers to lend their feedback and suggestions.

“I’m excited; the new changes for the news being through social media will be great for me,” graduate student Cameisha Brewer said. “I am very hands-on and anything I can read or watch on my phone or iPad will be much more convenient.”

“There’s no other source for local news really, so we depend on The (Daily) Citizen to keep us up-to-date,” professor of broadcast journalism Dutch Hoggatt said. “I’m glad it’s here — I hope the hardcopy of the newspaper never disappears, the actual paper copy.”

Porter has been with The Daily Citizen for about four months now, and prior to his move he worked with The Paragould Daily Press, which is a sister newspaper to The Daily Citizen; both are owned by Paxton Media Group. He said that so far the transition has been very smooth.

“The community has been very open with us and very receptive to our new direction and the things that we’re looking to do and have really partnered with us to make some of those things a reality,” Porter said.

The Daily Citizen is published every day except for Saturday and Monday, and can be viewed online every day starting at 2 a.m. To view entire stories online requires a subscription for $65 per year. The subscription fee for access to both the print and online edition is $141.50 for a year. According to Porter, there are more people reading The Daily Citizen now than any other time in its history.