'Missourian' Opens Redesign to the Public

By: Mark Fitzgerald For years, the Columbia Missourian has advocated and practiced public journalism. Now, in an unusual experiment, it is practicing what it calls "public prototyping" of a redesigned Sunday paper.

Instead of testing its ideas for the redesign with focus groups who meet behind closed doors, the Missourian (Click for QuikCap) on April 4 and May 2 published and delivered prototypes in place of the usual Sunday paper. And long before the prototypes were published, the Missourian inserted a mostly blank newsprint sheet on two Sundays. Readers were encouraged to "help create a new publication." One instruction read: "Draw. Doodle. Design. Turn the pages upside down or sideways if you want."

In another unusual twist, the prototype Sunday paper has been redesigned as a long tabloid, 17 inches in length (it is currently a broadsheet). The redesigned paper, which may be called the New Sunday Missourian, will launch in October.

The process is a way of staying flexible about a redesign, says Judy Bolch, the Harte Chair in Innovation at the University of Missouri School of Journalism: "At newspapers, we make redesign decisions internally. We agonize about them internally, and make prototypes internally. It's true we do focus groups, but once we put [the redesigned paper] out there ... it's very difficult to change it."

For a community paper that also serves as a lab for the j-school, the "public prototyping" also is a great research opportunity, Bolch adds. Graduate students are studying whether involving the public in the redesign has any effect on their attitude towards the paper or their later readership habits. "We want to know whether there's more commitment, more buy-in to the paper," she says.

By choosing to go tabloid on Sundays and staying a broadsheet during the week, the Missourian is turning the conventional wisdom among most newspaper designers on its head. Their notion is that a tabloid fits the frenetic mobile lifestyle of the American workday, while the broadsheet is perfect for the more leisurely pace of Sunday -- and the load of advertising inserts. "We wanted to send a message that this is a totally different paper," says Reuben Stern, senior news editor and a Mizzou assistant professor of journalism. The circulation of the thin Sunday Missourian has slipped below weekdays, so editors like how the tabloid format gives a more substantial feel. The Missourian's research isn't complete, but so far it shows that non-readers like the new format, while longtime readers would be just as happy if it remained a broadsheet.