When I say enterprise, you think of a starship. You know, Captain Kirk, Vulcans and, “Beam me up, Scotty!” Or you think of a different ship, the first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier. Or you think of rental cars.

When you say enterprise, I think of journalism.

Enterprise is a nuclear-powered newspaper story. It takes neutrons and protons of news and adds electrons. It usually involves taking a timely issue and tackling it in-depth, using multiple sources to go beyond a nucleus and explore a topic from many angles.

We always have put a premium on enterprise reporting, and now that we’re three weeks into a new format, we hope you recognize that our commitment to this quality journalism has increased.

In our old format, we called an enterprise package a centerpiece. We worked hard to produce centerpieces, but we never seemed to click on all cylinders.

Now we call the enterprise package a cover story. We’re working harder to plan and to give reporters more time to report.

Big breaking news still comes first. If a company is opening a call center that is bringing 350 jobs to Anderson, or if T.L. Hanna High School selects its new football coach, enterprise can hold for a day or two.

We’re proud of the cover stories our staff has produced in the past three weeks. Some of the enterprise highlights:

• Going green
• Pit bulls or scapegoats?
• I-85: High-speed corridor for drugs
• Pain at the pump
• Food fight: Grocers, shoppers face rising prices
• Lives lost too soon
• Carting disaster
• You are what you eat
• Rebel flag stirs up dress code debate in District 4

We’re still balancing enterprise with coverage of big events (Soiree, Snowbirds, GOP county council debates) and big breaking news (quadruple homicide).

Not every cover story subject appeals to every reader, but we do our best to pick subjects with mass-market appeal. We’re open to your suggestions. What are some topics that we should explore in-depth for future cover stories?

We hear criticism from some readers that there’s nothing but bad news in the newspaper. Sometimes Charmaine Smith-Miles’ “StoryTeller” column has been our cover story/centerpiece. She has a wonderful knack for finding good human-interest stories (many that are suggested by readers).

On days when we spare readers the bad news, we are criticized because “that isn’t news at all.” So we can’t win. But we keep on keeping on.

In our old format, we had four stories on an average front page. Because space is our final frontier, sometimes other stories would take away from the play we could give to a good centerpiece.

Now? We boldly want to go where we didn’t before.

Editor’s log, news date: 2008.5.14. In this new format, we don’t want our average edition to be, well, average. We want quality.

Anything else would be illogical.