As you can see, we have added a new section to the newspaper today, Mormon Times.

Why? Our readers, both in print and online, have told us they want more news and information about the LDS Church and its members. Our readers also have strongly reaffirmed their interest in a full-service daily newspaper that reports the local, national and international news in an unfiltered, accurate and unbiased manner. We will continue to do that, hopefully building on our successes of the past.

Mormon Times every week will contain articles that will inform and edify Latter-day Saints and others who are interested in LDS religion and culture. It will include news stories and features about the church and its members. It will have columns by Orson Scott Card and Jerry Johnston. It also will include a calendar of local events and helpful ideas and tips for dealing with many of the aspects of our time.

We will continue to publish the Church News, which is an official publication of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and distributed world-wide. We will continue our Religion and Ethics section on Saturday.

This new section also will not diminish our coverage of LDS-related breaking news that always has been a part of the paper's news coverage.

In addition to the new print section, we soon will be rolling out a new section on the deseretnews.com Web site. This new section, mormontimes.com, will be much more robust than the print version. It will include news items and columns that won't fit in the printed section. It also will include numerous other features that will be, we hope, informative, interesting and useful to our readers.

In a certain respect, this new section harkens back to the early history of the Deseret News. Virtually all of the early editors, typesetters and other employees were trained at an earlier LDS Church publication called the Times and Seasons. An essential element of the mission of the Times and Seasons was to inform and edify its readers.

That is our aim in this new section of the newspaper. We welcome your comments and suggestions as we go forward. Thank you.

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Joseph A. Cannon is editor of the Deseret Morning News