These are wrenching times for companies that own newspapers and those who’ve dedicated their lives to working on them. And, in many cases, if a newspaper wants to survive it must decide on some changes.
Nowhere has that been more evident in my home-base city of San Diego, California, where my former employer the San Diego Union-Tribune has over the past year changed hands as the Copley Press sold it to Platinum Equity. The new owners laid off a slew of extremely talented professionals and put out ads to hire people at entry level rates (even tellling some of those who were told they were being laid off that they could be rehired at the far lower entry-level pay scale). I was a reporter on the San Diego Union before the 1992 merger, covering among other things the border, Tijuana, Ronald Reagan’s immigration reform, the 1985 Mexico City earthquake (team reporting), the 1984 San Ysidro McDonald’s Massacre (some reporting but drafted onto the copy desk) and also worked in general assignment and did zone reporting. After I left the paper, the Evening Tribune was merged into the Union, but the paper still looked like the Union.
This week the paper unveiled a brand, new design, complete with new logo (above) which also included narrower pages (a way for newspapers to save on money). Did it work? Did the content — already greatly reduced due to the economy and staff layoffs — suffer? Is the new design something good for the early 21st century or is it a huge mistake, the discarding of a legacy and continuity?
Here is the new look:
I’m on an email list of former UT employees and people who were closely associated with the paper. And, needless to say, I am in the minority in liking and welcoming these changes and feeling theyr’e positive adaptations to a new, more difficult age for newspapers and for a company that has just bought a newspaper owned by many years by a family.
Here is the old front:
To look at the new design in detail go to this superb MUST READ American Copy Editors Society blog post analyzing it. It shows you parts of the new design and analyzes it.
I’m putting this on TMV because in this new era it might be useful to get readers’ reactions to this new design. And to the larger issue of how newspapers can try to adapt and whether in trying to adapt they can do it successfully or toss away older parts of their content or visual legacies. So your comments are welcome in District TMV. (Link at the bottom of this post). I will copy the comments and foward them onto the list of former UT staffers since they’ll be interested.
Since the list is private (sorry, I’m not going to pull a JournoList type reveal on this) suffice to say my view is in the minority — just like it often is on political issues facing our country.
Here is what I wrote on the email list:
My quick reaction to the new UT design:
1. I think it is a wise — VERY wise move.
2. I like it. I know every design change on a newspaper (even small ones) bring howls of outrage from some readers and cancellations but I do like it.
3. It’s a wise move from the standpoint of the amount of product. The UT had begun to look like a shrunken version of its old self — which it indeed was in both staff size and news hole. This rebranding makes it look like enough of a different paper so you don’t notice that as much.
4. It’s a new company and they are smart to put their imprint on it. In another era (for instance when KRN killed the Wichita Beacon when I was on the Wichita Eagle proclaming they would keep the best darn elements of both papers but actually killed the Beacon and created a bigger Eagle…or when the Trib was merged into the UT and it looked more like the San Diego Union than the Trib) when they would have to display, even celebrate, continuity we are in a new era. It’s the same product (a newspaper for San Diego) with a different look.
5. I like the left hand strip with stories and special deal.
6. Comics looks fine in classified and they haven’t removed strips.
7. The paper STILL is one of the strongest I have seen in my travels in terms of a local paper. There IS content — good content — in it.
8. Yes some type is smaller and that will upset some, but the overall look is a smart one.
9. This is a new century and with the competition from the Internet etc. a new look is unlikely to hurt.
It now looks a little more like the OC Register and less like the traditional SDU and later SDUT.
Number one reaction here is that the paper may be smaller but it’s somehow less notable since it looks like a new product. I travel and either feel cheated by the glorified shoppers that call themselves newspapers…but not with the UT. There is lots of “there” there..
The paper’s new parent company is stressing that it is now a “multi-platform” company. And it has also revamped its excellent website — which is increasingly important to its news operations SignOnSanDiego.
(UPDATE) Michael Grant, a former UTer, journalism prof, TMV co-blogger who also has a site The Write Outsource and Michael Grant.com gives us his reaction:
I think the new print version looks very goofy, and I think the new online version looks very good. I sense some conscious persuasion on the part of the company. “Here’s the future of print newspapers,” they are telling readers, “and here’s the online future.”
I want to stress that I was on the Union after writing many years overseas and then working for Knight Ridder’s Wichita Eagle-Beacon and then joined the paper, which was then owned by Copley. I left the paper with the goal of returning to freelance writing and to going into entertainment. Up until the past few years, when I’d travel I’d always load up on local newspapers and loved to eat meals at restaurants reading a stack of papers, going over the local coverage and Op-Ed pages.
But over the past few years, as the country sped towards an economic melt-down, most newpapers became shocking slivers of shadows of what they once were. Many had little local content, or uninspired content. National news? It wasn’t just that I ready read it on the Internet (I HAD: I check the Internet first thing in the morning) but national story copy was often perfunctory. Op-Ed pages shrunk or were eliminated (TMV offers more Op-Ed material now from bloggers and professional columnists than most newspapers). A few papers — the Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Sacramento Bee, Fresno Bee, New York Post, New York Daily News, USA Today — still had content and/or pizazz. But I feel cheated now when I buy most local papers that offer bland content — boring to this baby boomer who’s watching Howdy Doody DVDs, let alone to a young person listening to an iPod and tinkering with an iPad.
Leave your comments. Go to the link. Is this adapting to a new era, or throwing away what was good of a past era? Is this adjusting to new news realities or just one more audible breath in what some insist is the the death rattle of the newspaper industry? Would this design be a better delivery system for info, or not? To stress gain: the UT’s staff has been downsized as has content and stories are shorter. But, as I noted, I see lots of “there there” in terms of info and like the design. Sometimes when faced with a new reality, we all need to work within it. Is that the case here? Or is this “giving up?”
That’s just ME. What do you think?
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.