The venues for public discourse and debate changed very little over the many centuries before Johann Gutenberg worked his magic and the mass-printed word began shaping and disseminating the palaver at the water hole, the marketplace, the church, the castle, the palace, the farm and the village.
    People still held forth on the hopes, fears, marvels and miseries of their lives, but the platform they increasingly chose, and that came to matter the most, was the printed page.
    Gutenberg did one other thing. He kept me and the other members of the Salt Lake Tribune Editorial Board somewhat gainfully employed, albeit as common purveyors and traffickers. Yes, we trade in that same public palaver that defines who we are, what we're about and where we might be headed if we're not careful.
    Ours is a job that takes some explaining. We know this because we spend a great deal of time, and too little space in these pages, responding to your questions about what it is we do, how we do it and, in some cases (political endorsements come to mind), why, oh why, did we do it?
    Well, starting today, we're going to lift the coverlet a bit. When you turn the page you'll find a tutorial of sorts on The Tribune's Opinion section. It is mostly written and drawn in column and cartoon form by members of the board who, confined to the eighth floor of a building we'll be abandoning soon, generally have a whole
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lot of splainin' to do.
    One subject they haven't covered, and one I am frequently asked about, is the paper's nationally syndicated columnists - why and when we run the ones we do and whether we try to achieve a rough balance between liberals and conservatives.
    When I took this position in September 2003 the mix of columnists in the section was fixed to specific days of the week. Molly Ivins and Cal Thomas, for example, would appear only on a certain day of the week. If one of their columns arrived late, or one of them happened to be on vacation, there would be an editor's note acknowledging the absence to our readers.
    The argument for doing it that way is that veteran consumers of newspapers are thought to be such creatures of habit that they might find it jarring if anyone fiddled with the columnist lineup. I know that is true of several Tribune readers because several called when I began fiddling.
    This is what I told them: Columnists are like just about everyone else, capable of terrific work but, no surprise, incapable of delivering it every time. Nor do they always address subjects in a timely fashion, which means that columnists appearing on specific days may offer readers of, say, Friday's paper a stale reminder of what Tuesday's columnist had to say, and perhaps said better, about the same subject.
    We moved to expand The Tribune's roster of columnists and to occasionally run op-ed pieces that have appeared in another newspaper if we find the subject and treatment to be especially timely and original.
    We take the view, I tell readers, that most of them probably would prefer to read the best columns available on a given day from a larger and more diverse stable of writers that includes liberals such as Ivins, Paul Krugman and Maureen Dowd; moderates like Tom Friedman, David Broder and James Galloway; and conservatives such as Cal Thomas, Kathleen Parker and, now that William Safire has retired, David Lowry.
    The political labels I've just unfairly attached to these writers are next to worthless as not one of them has failed to surprise me with columns, seemingly written against type, that betray a refreshing independence of mind. Yes, even Cal and Molly, in case you wondered.
    Another question I'm frequently asked is just where the editorial board of The Tribune lines up on the political spectrum. It is often an earnest question, at times prompted by frustration or anger, but it is usually asked by readers who are quite convinced that they know the color of our underwear, so to speak. We are, I have it on good authority from a range of readers, both flaming liberals and shameless lackeys of the current president. That is, of course, when we are not being seen as hopelessly and ineffectually mired somewhere in-between, perish the thought.
    We don't put much stock in labels and have only one overriding agenda: To inform, to provoke thought and, on issues we editorialize about, to persuade. The common goal of the editorial board is to consistently engage the community of our readers with a variety of ideas and opinions that stimulate dialogue on issues that, in our view, matter the most to all of us, and on a few that merely strike us as silly.
    How we try to do that is the subject of a special three-page "Opinion page primer" beginning on Page AA3. We hope you find it interesting, useful and not too terribly confusing. We invite your questions and comments.
    You'll find us hanging around the water hole, trafficking and purveying.
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   Vern Anderson is The Tribune's editorial and opinion editor.