Cincy Enquirer to shrink (literally) next year

They spent millions on new printing presses around 2004. Guessing that was an investment that didn't pan out.

 

A paper here drastically cut down the size of its pages a couple years ago to the point that now it's not much more than a tab. When I first saw it, my impression was it looked like a little toy newspaper. Very sad.

 

Is this the dreaded Berliner format? Gannett has done it with several papers already.

 

I love how they took a current A1 and just smashed it down to fit in the new, smaller format. That's a great way to instill reader confidence in the new size ... the pic makes the people look like they're in a funhouse mirror.

Of course, we all know this means way less news on A1 and in the rest of the paper.

 

What they should do ... and maybe will ... is use A1 as a magazine-style cover, with main art promoting some sort of multi-page feature story inside.

If the front page is roughly the size of a legal-size piece of paper, not much room to do more than that and a bunch of promos.

 

What sense does it make to have the paper printed two hours away? There are southern parts of the Enquirer's circulation area that will be three hours from where the newspaper is printed.

How is this a good idea? And what will happen with deadlines?

 

Outsourcing is cheaper. Deadlines be damned. And god help the paper when there's a snow or ice storm.

 

Is there any chance of even a late prep score making the next day's edition? At what point does the Enquirer stop writing game stories and just run features from Tuesday through Saturday with the exception of occasional weekday day baseball game?

 

And as I understand it (though this is second-hand knowledge), the (rebranded) Kentucky Enquirer is usually put together after the city/Ohio paper.

 

It's been our publisher's intent to do this with our papers for at least three years. She put it off for at least a year and a half because she didn't want to impose redesigning the entire paper on me while I was interim managing editor/sports editor simultaneously.

Then it was supposed to happen in August. Now it's supposed to happen with our first paper of the new year (Our Jan. 3 edition). I've been on vacation since the 20th and haven't seen anything about what this new format involves. And the guy who was supposed to be redesigning our paper quit effective last Friday.

So I'm betting when I go in to work in the second, we'll still be doing things the old way because plans got derailed yet again. If not, I'll have no idea how many pages I'll need that night because I have no idea what 1 page of stuff in the old format = x pages of stuff in the new format. And I'll have a full slate of games and photos. Yay.