Like most newspapers, The Record publishes a print and online calendar. The intent is to provide readers with a single place to view the many happenings that occur each week on the South End. They’re also a resource for community groups and organizations, particularly those that lack the capital for traditional advertising, that utilize them as one of their number one places to announce events, functions, fundraisers, etc.

To these ends, the calendar is quite successful — people not only read it, they rely on it. It’s so important, in fact, that when something doesn’t get in, you can be sure we hear about it. Just this week we weathered the wrath of several submitters whose Saturday events didn’t make it into Wednesday’s paper. We only barely survived.

In the interests of self preservation, please let us express our regret, provide a detailed explanation of how the calendar works along with its shortcomings, and announce a small change that we hope will result in the inclusion of even more listings.

First and foremost, readers should know that the calendar has been something of an experiment. Two years ago, a few policy changes were implemented in an attempt to improve the submission process and result in more events. Namely, entries were a bit longwinded — some were short books — so a word cap of 75 words was created. We also started running submitted entries in the order they are received rather than chronologically. In other words, the ordering of events under each date is based on when it was submitted rather than the time of the function. Simple and fair, that was the intent.

Calendars since these changes went into effect seemed just as healthy and packed with events, so it’s unclear any great benefit resulted. All we know is that the calendar remains a busy affair, so busy that our greatest headache is a lack of space. For example, the Wednesday paper included so many events on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday that only one Saturday item could be included on the page — the first one submitted. Those below were left out, which is unfortunate because even though they’re guaranteed prime real estate in the weekend edition, readers don’t have enough time to adequately plan ahead for a same-day event.

We understand the problem, but there’s not a lot we can do. The newspaper isn’t getting any bigger, so adding another dedicated page is out. We could begin picking and choosing which events to include, something we do regularly in the rest of the paper with news, but we see the calendar and opinion pages as sacred space that belongs to the community and are reluctant to meddle by introducing subjectivity.

The only solution we see is to reduce the size of entries further. So, hence forth, calendar entries must be 50 words or less. That’s just enough space for the bare essentials: the who, what, where, when and why.

It’s not a perfect solution, but it’s what we came up with. We’re open to ideas, however, so anyone with a magic answer please don’t hesitate to let us know.

Calendar items can be submitted via our website, www.southwhidbeyrecord.com or emailed directly to the editor at editor@southwhidbeyrecord.com.