In less than a month, The Dispatch will celebrate 145 years of service to the central Ohio community. One way we want to note the occasion is by including community voices in our brainstorming and planning for news coverage. To that end, we're going to do something that I'm pretty confident has not been done here in the past 145 years: We are creating the Dispatch Sounding Board, a reader advisory panel to meet and talk with us once a month.

In less than a month, The Dispatch will celebrate 145 years of service to the central Ohio community.

One way we want to note the occasion is by including community voices in our brainstorming and planning for news coverage. To that end, we're going to do something that I'm pretty confident has not been done here in the past 145 years: We are creating the Dispatch Sounding Board, a reader advisory panel to meet and talk with us once a month.

We seek Dispatch readers who are willing to dedicate an hour or two a month for a year to thoughtful conversation about how this news staff does what it does each day � and how we can do it better to serve this community.

I know what some of you are thinking right now: You could do better at getting the paper to me on time, or where I asked you to put it. You could fix your customer-service phone line to reduce wait times. You could end the annoying typos we see in print. And for God's sake, don't ever mess with the times on Page 2 of Sports again.

I want to apologize to all who have been affected by any of the challenges we've wrestled with in recent weeks. We continue to seek satisfactory solutions to providing you with reliable delivery, accurate content and the customer service you deserve.

A short side trip about those Sports times before I get back to the advisory board: Like many of you, I set my late-evening TV schedule by the times for sporting events listed in the "On the Air" column on Page 2 of Sports. Also like many of you, I was puzzled (and then mortified) to see that in Thursday's paper all of the times were hours off � as if we had been plopped into another time zone. In fact, we were.

With one errant push of a button late in the production process, a designer inadvertently ran a program that converted all times on that page to those for another time zone. The program exists mainly for application on Sports agate pages, and because the same information on those pages is used in about 100 newspapers across the country, it allows designers to build the page once and hit a button to instantly reflect times in the various time zones. On Wednesday night, a designer inadvertently applied it to a Dispatch page that did not need any time changes.

That affected not only On the Air, but also a story about start times for some Ohio State University football games this fall. We ran a corrected list of those start times on Page 2 of Sports on Friday. And the designers are now acutely aware of your unhappiness and my unhappiness that it happened.

Going forward, we will redouble our efforts to minimize production concerns so that when the Sounding Board meets for the first time in July, our staff and our reader advisory panel members can talk about the heart of the matter: news coverage and editorial-page opinions.

We want to know what you think we do well and what we can improve. We want to know what you think we're missing in terms of topics, stories, photos or videos � in print and on Dispatch.com. We'd like to know whose voices you enjoy hearing or those you think are missing and should be included.

Our goal is to represent this city and the larger community in all of its diversity and complexity.

Much of it is beautiful. We are blessed in central Ohio to be part of this growing, vibrant cultural and economic engine called Columbus � one that feeds and clothes and nourishes hundreds of thousands of people far beyond the city limits.

Some of it is not so pretty. The vibrancy of this city tends to mask some of its ills, such as the high rate of infant mortality and pervasive poverty. That Greater Columbus has had the largest increase in suburban poverty in the state since 2000 is simply stunning.

We need to talk about these things. And we need to do something about them.

So, if you're a Dispatch reader who wants to be part of the conversation that helps The Dispatch newsroom staff better understand the needs of this community and how to cover them, please sign up for the Sounding Board. We're looking for a diverse group of about 20 volunteers, representing a variety of ages, races and walks of life.

Register for consideration by filling out the online form at this address on Dispatch.com.

Once we select the group, I'll share more about the members and what we're talking about.

amiller@dispatch.com

@dispatcheditor