By: E&P Staff The Sun of Baltimore is the latest Tribune Co. paper to undergo a redesign after its parent company announced it would strip 500 pages a week from its newspapers.
The new paper will launch Sunday Aug. 24 and promises to complement "readers' busy lives" and offer "high impact promotion opportunities," according to a Sun press release.
"By delivering local news and information in a more visually appealing way, we will make the Sun's valuable coverage more accessible to more people," Editor Tim Franklin said in a statement.
In a memo to staff Sun Publisher Tim Ryan said the move is more than just a redesign -- it?s a "reinvention." He described some of the changes, which include the use of photographs and graphics and more interplay between the print edition and the Web site.
"The reader-friendly layout will be balanced with a modular ad strategy, which provides higher visibility and more impact for the advertiser's investment," Ryan wrote. "This represents a vibrant, dynamic transformation of the Sun."
The paper will consist of three broadsheet sections: news, sports, and features. The news section will contain local, national, international, and business news. Sports will return to a broadsheet format and the new feature section will be called "You."
The classified section will be in tabloid format called "Find It!" which will run in the Sunday edition.
"This fall's hearty news environment, which will include historic Presidential election coverage and a new roster for the Baltimore Ravens' season, provides the ideal setting to reintroduce Baltimore to The Sun. While the newspaper will be an important promotional tool in and of itself, we are also developing marketing plans to build excitement among readers, advertisers and the community," Ryan wrote in the staff memo.
According to the latest figures from the Audit Bureau of Circulations, average daily circulation at the Sun was flat at 232,360 copies while Sunday was down 1.2% to 372,970.
Lee Abrams, Tribune's chief innovation officer, said in a statement that he was "blown away" by the prototype. "It was intelligent, thought out and dramatic ... a tour de force package that's going to help re-write the Tribune Co. -- and newspapers."
In June, the Orlando Sentinel was the first Tribune paper to undergo a redesign with no outside help in a matter of months. The Sentinel has a new banner, color scheme, maps, graphs, and "charticles."
The Orlando Sentinel and The Sun?s sister publication, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel in Ft. Lauderdale, is currently deep in its own redesign, set to launch on Aug. 17. Charles Apple?s Visual Editors has the front-page
prototype of the Sun-Sentinel -- and he called the redesign "radical."
The Sun-Sentinel drops its hyphen and relies on numbers, big photos, modules that distinguish stories, lots of colors and an orange-red banner with lots of black (not unlike Orlando).
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