Change is Now, Part 3: Redesigning Orlando

By: Jennifer Saba Editor's note: This story first appeared in the August print edition of E&P.

Long before Tribune executives announced at the beginning of June a plan to use a 50/50 ad-to-edit ratio as a yardstick for its stable of papers, the Orlando Sentinel was in the thick of revamping its printed pages. A change, they believed, would inspire a surge in local readership and wring costs from operations.

Barely three weeks after that fateful Tribune conference call, the Orlando Sentinel on June 22 unveiled its new look, with more graphs, "charticles," looming pictures, and liberal use of colors like aqua, pink, lilac, red and avocado ? save for its flag, which is now swathed in black. Depending on your sense of humor these days, black is a pitch-perfect choice as the newspaper industry gropes its way through 2008.

And that's precisely what is driving the redesign, say the paper's executives.

"It was not a directive back in March," Orlando Sentinel Editor Charlotte Hall says of the re-do. The paper already devised a roadmap independently before Tribune issued the marching orders. A revamp had been on editors' minds for some time, she explains ? and in the spring, Lee Abrams, Tribune's chief innovation officer, "came down here a couple of times. By the time he came, we already had something to show him. He was actually quite helpful and was very supportive."

Orlando had to transform at a speed typically not reached by newspapers. Redesigns are famously drawn-out affairs consisting of focus groups, outside consultants, and lots of input (sometimes from advertisers) about the smallest detail. The Orlando Sentinel took about three and-a-half months from whiteboard to press.

Oddly, the Sentinel was one of the few metro papers that actually saw a bump in its average daily Monday-through-Friday circulation this year. It rose 0.3% to 227,593 copies for the six months ending March 2008, where its peers' circulation on average fell about 3.4%, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations. It was relatively stable circulation, too: other-paid for the period was at 7% of total circ, while discounted copies stood at 22%. The rest, 70%, was the highly coveted 50% or higher paid circ.

To sit back and bask in 0.3% was untenable, since Florida continues to feel the effects of the real estate crisis ? which has spread to just about every other ad category. Tribune's $13 billion debt puts extra pressure on its properties; it didn't take Tribune owner Sam Zell to announce the morph initiative for executives in Orlando to know they had to slash costs. With the price of newsprint expected to jump 17.9% to $700/ton on average in 2008 (according to Goldman Sachs estimates), Orlando chose to cut its newshole and paper consumption. And as E&P went to press, Orlando had begun to quietly cut up to 20% of its newsroom staff.

Hall, along with Howard Greenberg, publisher of both the Orlando Sentinel and South Florida Sun-Sentinel in Ft. Lauderdale, knew they had to go into action. "We had already planned to reduce our newshole independently," he says. "You didn't have to be a genius in our business to know what is going on."

Greenberg declined to answer how many pages they stripped out of the Orlando Sentinel but he did say they are now pretty close to the 50/50 ratio. The paper is undergoing a second phase of its redesign, which involves typographical elements, and will move the needle a little more in order to get fully to 50/50 by the end of summer.

In editorial, the Sentinel is running the occasional half-page vertical spadia ? a gatefold ad format ? to shave consumption. "You are going to see more of that in the industry now to minimize newsprint," Greenberg notes. "It won't be rampant, but it happens from time to time" to keep from jumping stories. In the July 3 edition, for example, a spadia appears in the middle of the "Style & Trends" section. And the format has been used in the classifieds and Op-Ed sections, too.

"We wanted to radically change the paper," says Greenberg. "What we had was not working. It was only attracting older readers and not a younger audience. And by younger audience, I mean 30 through 45-year-olds. Forget the 18-year-olds."

Orlando wanted to go after this demographic, affirms Hall, in order to broaden the Sentinel's audience but at the same time keep its loyal readers. "We want the paper to have life and change and not to be static," she adds. The newsroom was already schooled in the method of ASF, or alternative story forms (read: charticles, the use of bullet points, learning to write shorter stories) since it was introduced about two years ago.

A new product launch was never on the table. Hall says that strategy works well in commuter cities like Chicago and New York, but not so much in her market. Orlando, she explains, is a younger city by Florida standards: "We wanted to create a paper that really looked like our community ? which is young, lively, bright, fast-moving. I felt like we looked too old and too staid."

Bonita Burton, associate managing editor for visuals, says they mocked up a tab called Pink Eye ? "catch it while you can!" ? as a joke. Ever since Hall walked into Orlando by way of Newsday, Burton says they have flirted with the idea of a tab but the economics won't support it.

Executives wanted a swift implementation. That meant no focus groups, no outside consultants, and keeping the team responsible for the transformation small. "There is nothing about the consumer we don't know about in our markets," says Greenberg of the unusual decision to eschew outside influence. "We didn't feel doing more research was the right answer. One piece of research that was consistent was that we were losing readers in the 30-to-45 age groups. It was 50% making use of past research and 50% intuition.

"We wanted to move quickly. The larger the group, the longer it takes," he adds. "We had to do something. We had to get something going. I don't just mean Orlando, I mean the industry."

The last thing Hall and others wanted was to get bogged down in bureaucracy. They did share prototypes with other directors, including circulation and advertising executives, and made them part of the conversation. Burton started a blog posting changes and ideas to get employee feedback.

However, the main decision-making team consisted of Hall and Burton. Outsiders, including advertisers, did not see prototypes, though they were alerted the changes were coming.

Burton, who had just given birth, had the Herculean task of overseeing the redesign while getting out the daily paper. "Honestly, we wanted to be first," she says about the Tribune-wide process. "Orlando was the epicenter of innovation and we wanted to always avoid the design by committee ? tweaking things endlessly. We put our best ideas on the paper and put them into print."

Burton says they selected colors they knew would reproduce well and were vibrant. The black, she explains, acts as a contrast to the front page and section fronts. It's "dramatic" and "classic" and "timeless," Burton says. "And it stands out."

Ideas that were trashed in the past were brushed off and given new consideration. The team kept an open mind. Columnists were given more prominence, for example. Entertainment stories in Section A that previously were drawn from the wires instead borrowed from the paper's entertainment bloggers. When circulation suggested moving the daily digest (which details what's inside) above the fold on Page One, the first reaction was to dismiss the suggestion. "But I tried it and found a way to make it work," Burton says.

So how does she look?
The vibrant views of the redesign floating around on the Internet, however, don't quite match what it's like to flip through the actual print edition.

The Orlando Sentinel sent E&P several copies from the launch through July 5. The printing of the kickoff June 22 edition looked washed out due to production glitches ? an unusual occurrence, since Tribune is regarded for its high-quality printing. Greenberg says the Sentinel has been using a 28-pound grade of paper for about three years now, and that the printing quality had to do with loads of paper that had linted. "It's frustrating," he says of the process, "but this didn't dampen the spirit." The production crew worked through the issue, and later editions prove that quality is improving.

Some might say the graphic elements and bullet points give the appearance that the Sentinel is light on content. In the July 5 edition, five of the 16 stories that ran in Section A were staff-produced; the others were culled from wire reports. While "local, local, local" is still the mantra at most papers, the Sentinel offers a six-page section most days with almost half of it ads. The stories, however, are all staff-written. On the first Monday of the redesigned product, that section was branded "Local In-Depth" and included an AP story on an "elusive" woodpecker ? with an Arkansas dateline. The "In-Depth" part of the section title has since been dropped. The "Business & Money" section is often mainly composed of ads, obits, and a Weather page.

Allan Mutter, in his "Reflections of a Newsosaur" blog, riffing on the prototypes of the front page that had leaked online the week before the rollout, wrote that the changes were too much and too abrupt.

"Changes in products as personal and familiar as a newspaper should be undertaken slowly, cautiously, incrementally and thoughtfully. In other words, a shock-jock approach to newspaper marketing is almost certain to backfire," he wrote.

Visual Editors blogger and former Virginian-Pilot graphics director Charles Apple commented (judging from the JPEGs): "It's big. It's bold. It's splashy. It seems to have lots of interesting, scannable material, presented in a very interesting way. I liked the old Sentinel, but I like this even more."

The Poynter Institute's Media Business Analyst Rick Edmonds thumbed through some copies and for the most part liked what he saw. "I think it's a big enough change and it has a different feeling than a traditional paper," he said, adding that Poynter studies show that "people really do pay more attention and retain more information" with more graphical elements and shorter entry points. He called the production quality "fair at best."

Designer Mario Garcia weighed in on his blog: "It is a bit tabloidy, indeed, but that is good in my way of thinking. Wake them up, and squeeze that orange juice in their face; pull them by their Mickey Mouse ears, and show them that an American newspaper does not necessarily have to be dull, or aimed to please the Mamie Eisenhowers of the world.

"As in any other redesign, some will love it, others will hate it, but I give the Sentinel staff and its designers a B+ for effort, and for their adventurous spirit," he added.

Greenberg would not release circulation figures for the several weeks following the redesign. But early on, the paper received less than 200 stops directly related to the new look.

"Right now in our industry," says editor Hall, "the biggest risk is taking no risk."