Newspapers don't normally sell access to news pages, and certainly we would not give away content privileges on any other news page. I'm sure County Executive John Leopold would love to have his staff write the stories for the front page, but that's not going to happen for any price.

But partnering with the hospital on the Health page seemed to make sense. We don't have a health reporter to write about medical issues and often use stories from syndicated services that quote doctors from other cities.

The local hospital is giving us stories about local physicians and programs it has to offer - in their words, without an effort to balance the copy with comments from other hospitals or from doctors who don't practice at AAMC.

The stories are written in newspaper style and the hospital staff is responsible for the page's design. To be open and transparent about the partnership, a disclaimer is clearly displayed at the top of the page.

I'm not entirely comfortable with the arrangement, purely for journalistic reasons. But in the end I think the reader benefits - and that's my goal.

Instead of generic stories originating from another city, the reader will have local news featuring people they recognize, doctors they use and services that are available to them. The hospital staff is getting to the stories we are not able to write because of other priorities.

Is the page more readable now? You tell me.

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COLUMNISTS - Following my recent remarks about the balance of the syndicated columnists on our editorial page (The Sunday Capital, March 9), several readers offered suggestions for additional columnists to level the playing field.

I am currently looking at several more liberal writers, including Amy Goodman, to see if I can find someone suitable who will get juices flowing on both ends of the political spectrum. Surely, we can handle a little of that, can't we?

I liked the comment from one reader who wondered why we need syndicated columnists, especially those who already appear in The Washington Post.

"I recall a time when The Capital gave more space to letters and guest columns. Why not return to this format, save the money syndicated columns undoubtedly cost, and leave the bigger media outlet to publish them? Your readership subscribes to The Capital for local news and opinion, not syndicated commentators."

That's a good point. We no longer run full pages of letters to get us through occasional backlogs. We were able to manage the volume better by siphoning off political endorsements (vote for me, or my pal), letters dealing with international issues (such as Iraq), and letters that are redundant (such as many on global warming).

With these restrictions, we feel that the letters we publish are more locally focused and, frankly, of higher quality. I shift some letters, usually those making a point that has already been made repeatedly, to our Web site.

But I like the suggestion about opening more space. So today, the op-ed page is all local - including the editorial cartoon. We'll use syndicated columnists on this page only when local material is unavailable.

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CANCELLATION - A subscriber of 10 years cancelled her subscription recent because we "praise" too many minorities, and not enough Caucasians, on the front page.

I yearn - probably hopelessly - for the day when people are judged by their achievements and character, not their skin color. Do we really need to keep count to see which race is ahead?

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CROFTON COUNCIL - I don't ever remember a civic body passing a resolution criticizing a newspaper story. But that's what the Greater Crofton Council, or GCC, did last week when it voted to support a former president and current planning and zoning chairman who was the focus of a story.

An article (The Sunday Capital, March 9) reported that Torrey Jacobsen may have violated state ethic rules when, in testifying before a state legislative committee, he didn't disclose that he was the executive director of and registered lobbyist for a group that represents the unions and management of unionized grocery stores.

He identified himself as a small businessman concerned that development not occur over fly ash landfills - without mentioning that the development the legislation would have blocked included a nonunionized grocery store that would compete with those operated by the members of his organization.

One GCC member said that we did not point out that Mr. Jacobsen was always against big-box stores, even before he became a lobbyist.

We did report that. In fact, we quoted Mr. Jacobsen as saying, "I've done that the whole time I've been in the Crofton area. My story has never changed."

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Tom Marquardt is publisher and executive editor of The Capital. His e-mail address is tmarquardt @capitalgazette.com.