“Why do you keep changing things?” a reader asked me in a recent e-mail.

Why, indeed? It’s a good question, and a fair one, particularly on the eve of another significant change in the paper.

Tomorrow, we will eliminate two long-standing daily comics and introduce two new ones.

Next Sunday, we will unveil three new Sunday comics and drop three others. Our reasoning is simple: The five comic strips slated for elimination were actually selected by you, our readers.

You can find much more information about these changes, and how we made them, on today’s A-9.

We asked you to vote last summer on your favorite and least-favorite comic strips, and the five comics being shown the door lost that vote.

The new ones weren’t chosen randomly, and they certainly don’t reflect the whims and desires of any single person here at the Sun Journal, least of all me.

They were chosen with the same sort of logical approach: We picked the proven favorites of newspaper readers across the country. The new strips are not at all “new” or untested. They have proven to be the most popular in the business.

Today is the last day for the old lineup. The two new daily comics begin tomorrow, and three new Sunday strips start next week.

We realize that there are at least a few fans of every comic strip on the page. Plus, we understand that some readers become attached to their favorites as the years go by.

But, we also realize that some comic strips – like everything else – lose their original zip and relevance as time passes. So, a strip that might have had a giant audience years ago may only have a small one today.

That seems to be the case for the five that didn’t make the cut.

But, returning to that reader’s question, why does the Sun Journal keep changing things?

Within the past year, we have added the “b” section to the Sunday paper, moved the Perspective section to the back of the C section, and moved Encore from a supplement to part of the regular newspaper.

I might also note that we added two new color units to our press and there’s more color for everyone throughout our pages. I got no complaints from readers about that one.

Change is, without doubt, unsettling, no less for us than for you as readers.

But we change for the same reasons that all businesses change: Either to better serve our current readers or to attract new ones.

How many TV shows in the primetime weekday lineup have been there for 10 years?

Not one.

Yet every one of the comics in our section has been running for at least 10 years, most far longer than that. Some have been around since the 1940s. Spider-Man, one of the comics we are canceling, was launched in 1962, more than four decades ago.

Yet, as we know, every aspect of our lives and the world around us is changing at an increasing velocity.

For newspapers, this has created an interesting challenge: We know from our research, from observation and from business trends, that we’re dealing with a great divide.

Just for argument’s sake, I’ll put the line at 35 years of age. Readers (like me) have spent their lives seeking news and information in certain ways, namely from books, magazines, newspapers, TV and radio. We are, generally, loyal creatures of habit: subscribe to a newspaper and stick with it for 40, 50, 60 or more years.

Yes, we have thousands of loyal readers, and we are forever thankful for them.

But behind them we have a generation of what I call “information omnivores,” people who aren’t loyal to “meat-and-potatoes” approaches to news, like my two 20-something sons.

Their news and information comes in bits and pieces from a wider variety of sources. They read newspapers on the Web, they may download pod casts, they visit blogs, they have hundreds of TV channels at their fingertips, and they sign up for “customized” news delivery from Google or Yahoo. They can get movies on their iPods and sports scores on their cell phones.

They get videos from YouTube and real-time stock quotes on their Blackberries. They may have Sirius radio in their cars, including a host of news stations and networks, and they are running streaming video of CNN on their computers, plus have more than 100 stations available on their satellite TVs, including the BBC, MSNBC and Fox news networks.

The challenge facing all newspapers is this: How do we reach them? How do we meet their needs for local information? How in the world do we even get their attention?

And just to complicate things a bit: The way they define “news” is considerably different from their parents. They are mobile, they are entertainment-oriented, they consider Portland and Boston and the entire state of Maine within their entertainment range.

They want news and opinions about all sorts of topics, including lifestyle choices and, shall I say, dating and mating.

And, if this isn’t complicated enough, research shows they process information differently from their parents. I am partial to the design of the Wall Street Journal, New York Times and the New Yorker. In other words, give me a headline and a long, serious story and I’m set.

We know that younger readers and users of our Web site want more: more color, more graphics, more photos, more sound and more video.

It’s all enough to make an old-time editor like me want to throw up his hands and simply bury his head in doing what he’s always done.

But if we believe that newspapers have a role in a community, a critical role, to give us a common understanding of the place we live and the challenges we face – and I do – then we need to reach these readers.

The actuarial tables don’t lie – none of us is getting out of here alive, and our base of older, loyal readers grows slightly smaller by the year.

So, the Sun Journal must change. It must adapt. It must grow in new directions.

Sometimes, as we change, we will make mistakes. We’ll try some things that simply miss the mark. Sometimes we will launch something, then fix and improve it as we go.

The new “b” section is an example of that.

I only ask two things of you, our readers:

First, that you put these changes in perspective. For instance, tomorrow we will change exactly 12.5 percent of our daily comics. Next Sunday we will change 7.5 percent of our Sunday lineup. Yes, it’s a nod to younger readers, but, clearly, not the apocalypse.

Our loyal readers get 35 Sun Journal sections each week. We took one of those 35 and remade it specifically for our under-35 readers. About 95 percent of the paper is as it was.

Second, give the new comics a chance, an honest chance. I guarantee you that in six months they will have a loyal following of their own.

Who knows, you may actually like one of them.

And remember, there’s only one constant in this world: change.

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