Imagine waking up one morning to discover you’d grown by 87 inches! Most folks would freak out.

Such overnight growth is unheard of. Just think, if an average man grew by 87 inches vertically, he’d be towering above NBA stars at a whopping 13 feet.

If the growth were horizontally, the same man’s waist would grow from say 34 inches to an unbelievable 121 inches.

In either case, if these incredible overnight growth spurts happened to a human, it would be time to call the National Enquirer and the Guinness Book of World Records.

Believe it or not, something in this community did, in fact, grow at such an incredible rate recently — this newspaper.

In July this newspaper began printing two editions: one for Mississippi readers and one for Louisiana readers.

As part of that change we’ve added a Region page each day that contains — at a minimum 87 inches more news.

Doing so wasn’t intended to divide the community, or help the newspaper simply make more money. The change was an effort to give our readers — on both sides of the Mississippi River — more news.

About two years ago, we realized we’d let our Concordia Parish coverage slip, and we began covering the parish seriously for the first time in years.

Through the hard work of Louisiana reporter Nita McCann, we’ve managed to provide daily coverage of everything from routine government meetings and nail-biting elections to stories about parish volunteers and crises such as last year’s Ferriday water problems.

The only real problem with that added coverage over the past few years was figuring out where to put it all.

A few months ago, we simply didn’t have enough space to print all of our news. This led to a daily hair-pulling session (see photo above for the results of this) in which we toiled over which news to put in and which news to hold.

Some days we looked as though we did nothing but cover Concordia Parish, other days it looked as though we exclusively covered Natchez and Adams County.

Why not simply print more pages?

Sounds simple enough, right?

I wish it were that easy. I wish we could print as many pages each day as we need. But unfortunately, we’re a business.

If we add pages, our expenses go up tremendously. Our expenses range from everything from tons of newspaper each month and hundreds of pounds — yes pounds — of ink to office supplies.

We could write the best stories and make unbelievable photographs each day but if we couldn’t afford to print them, what good would they be?

At the end of the month our checking account must balance or we won’t remain in business long.

This newspaper decided months ago that the extra costs involved in producing two editions was worth it for our readers. In fact, not doing so was cheating our readers.

So what’s different in each edition?

With rare exception both editions contain almost identical news. Our priority is to keep locally produced news the same in each edition.

I say &uot;rare exception&uot; because on a few occasions we’ve made a mistake and omitted a story or a photo from one of the editions. In each case they were &uot;learning errors&uot; not intentional omissions.

The extra space each day allows us to add more local news and more state and regional news.

A few months ago on a Monday (typically one of our smaller newspaper days) our A section might contain only a front page and perhaps one tiny page inside on which to put the news of the entire world.

Now with the addition of the Region page, our newspaper has more space inside each day — 365 days a year. That space equates to more news.

And we think each of our readers deserves that — even if it means we had to gain 87 inches to achieve it.

Kevin Cooper is managing editor of The Democrat. He can be reached at (601) 445-3541 or by e-mail at kevin.cooper@natchezdemocrat.com.