DMN's makeover du jour — Thoughts?

Sorry, rob. Your PDF link has locked up my computer three times, but I was just in Lexington two weeks ago.

It's the spitting image. The same rules, spacing, heds, centerpiece style...sure, the H-L doesn't have the colors, and the flag is different. But the front itself? Spitting image.

 

Until management whacked it. Of course.

Rob: That's not indicative of what the Herald-Leader does throughout the paper. The resemblance is there and it is strong.

 

Well either way there are certainly worse looking papers to be compared to.

It's not like someone said it looks like Bakersfield.

 

I'm not saying 'sorry' like it's a bad thing. I think Lexington is very clean. I was just commenting on rob saying he doesn't see it.

 

Hey, no worries about the Lexington thing. I'm probably just a little punchy and defensive after a few days of no sleep!

And DemoChristian, yeah, the newshole is smaller. The page is about 6% smaller and the design changes (body type, spacing) make it much more than that. And we've tried to be honest about it and tell people that the page is smaller. And certainly everything on the page is edited tighter (stories, but also headlines are smaller, photos and graphics are smaller proportionately).

And that's the rub. We knew we needed to make changes readers would like because we knew we had to make the product smaller. That's why the whole key was to focus on the legibility of everything and make it easier to read, and, yes easier to use (and all I mean by that is make it easier for readers to find things and spend their limited amount of time more efficiently, I'm not talking about a "Universal remote").

But we couldn't pretend like they were getting everything they got before, either. We've tried to be honest about that, but we're also not trumpeting it as the top asset either.

 

What was the thinking behind increasing the white space and leading/size of the type when you're shrinking the news hole as it is by losing page size? Are you worried that's just going to compound the problem?

 

When all the papers converted to the 50" web in 2000-02, that's exactly what they did. They tightened everything up from gutters to body type to spacing between stories. And you were able to cram a ton of stuff in there, but the type wasn't legible and it made everything incredibly dense.

At the same time, we were getting feedback from readers that they didn't have much time and wanted us to make it easier on them. To get them to what they wanted as soon as possible.

We didn't feel like cramming everything even tighter was going to get us there. So we went the opposite direction. We changed the leading in the body type to make it easier to read and loosened everything else up while adding labels and lines between stories. I'm hoping we added organization and structure where there was density and rigidness before.

And it was absolutely tough to do at the same time we were tightening up the product. But if we didn't do it now, we were never going to do it.

The hope is you're making the experience easier for the people who read us, especially as they are rifling through inside pages. My hope is that if they read us cover to cover, you're making it an easier experience — maybe one that lets them give their reading glasses a break. And if they are spending five minutes with our entire product, you're hopefully making that five minutes as efficient as possible.

Ultimately, they'll let us know if we're getting the job done.

 

Actually, it looks like the St. Joseph News-Press circa late 1990s.

 

Dude, NOTHING will ever look that good again!

 

It looks like the 1998 Omaha World-Herald.

 

That cracked me up.

 

Re: DMN's makeover du jour — Thoughts?

I agree with the color comment. If colors were added to make things more interesting or appealing or whatever, fine. But who really has trouble looking through the sections and seeing Sports or Business or Metro? It's in 100-point type at the top of the page. Making it red doesn't make it easier to find. The way that was presented strikes me as being patronising.