By: Mark Fitzgerald Tribune Has One For Next Week
CHICAGO - Chicago newspapers are showing new faces to the world.
Last Monday, the Daily Herald in Arlington Heights, Ill., brought out its
first redesign since 1986 - a period when it nearly doubled its circulation
from about 74,000 to 145,902. Next Monday, the market-leading Chicago
Tribune, with a weekday circulation of 618,097, unveils the long-awaited
redesign that will coincide with its narrower web width.
Neither redesign is a radical departure. Both leaned hard on research to come up
with better organization to allow readers to speed through the papers - or
not.
"We can deliver value to people who read us a lot and value it a lot - and
to the people who don't read us much but could find a lot to value," said Owen
Youngman, the Tribune's vice president of development. Montreal designer
Lucie Lacava assisted
editorial in the redesign.
Among the most notable changes in the Tribune: The Friday entertainment
tabloid becomes a broadsheet.
Body type fonts and size will remain the same despite the newsprint-saving
narrower width, said Youngman, who added, "We didn't recapture all of that
newsprint savings."
The Daily Herald will not be reducing its own web width until new presses
are up and running in two years.
But the paper could not wait that long for a redesign, Publisher Daniel E.
Baumann said. "The look had not only become dated, but the design rules have
sort of eroded over the years," he said.
Norfolk, Va.-based designer Alan Jacobson said his goal was to change the
paper's look "from a folksy hometown paper into one that reflects its more
sophisticated audience, to give it more of a metro feel without being quite so
imposing or distant."
The market's second-biggest paper, the 471,031-circulation tabloid Chicago
Sun-Times, has postponed its long-planned redesign indefinitely because of
installation problems with its new presses.
Mark Fitzgerald (mfitzgerald@editorandpublisher.com) is editor at large for E&P.
Copyright 2001, Editor & Publisher.
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