A few years ago, back when the "Bedford Briefs" / "Around & About" / "Area Briefs" column ran on the front page, we had a rule of thumb that items only appeared in it once, not day after day.

In recent years, after moving the column inside, we've loosened up on that rule, and -- for the most part -- have allowed items to stay in the column from the time they're submitted until the event takes place.

During slow seasons of the year, that's a fine policy.

Right now, however, the policy is not working.

In recent days, we've had 20 more column inches of briefs each day than we had room to print. That means we have to leave some things out. And since all of us in the newsroom collaborate on the column, and there are so many different announcements running, it's hard to keep track of things in a way that would let us make sure that everyone is getting the same level of publicity.

We had one woman come in a week ago to complain that her church conference wasn't getting the every day, day-after-day publicity she expected. She informed Doug Dezotell and myself in a very haughty manner that she expected the free publicity for her event to be given in exactly the manner requested.

The trouble was, after she left, Doug realized that she had left some important information out of her announcement. I went online and try to fill in the gaps, but unfortunately the church hadn't updated its web site and I didn't realize that the information I found was out of date. So we ended up publishing some incorrect information. Fortunately, the man who called Doug to let us know about our mistake was a lot better ambassador for the church than the woman who had brought us the information in the first place.

Anyway, I've been running through various ideas about re-organizing briefs.

* We could put a two-week restriction on advance announcements and say that the briefs column is only for announcing events that will take place in the next 14 days. Announcements for events farther out than that could appear once, to promote advance sales or entries or what have you, but wouldn't appear day-after-day and would need to be re-submitted when the two-week announcement period rolls around.

* We could leave out some types of announcements that already appear in another part of the paper -- for instance, no revival services because they are already listed on our Friday church page, or no golf tournaments because they're already listed in the sports briefs. The trouble with this is that some churches wait until the last minute to tell us about revival meetings and special services, so that the meeting would already be over with by the time the next Friday church page rolled around.

* We could limit the amount of information allowed for each announcement, making sure that each announcement includes a contact phone number for those who wanted to learn more.

Those are just a few possible ideas. If you've got suggestions or other input, let me know, at jcarney@t-g.com.

John I. Carney is city editor of the Times-Gazette and covers county government and other topics. His home page is lakeneuron.com.