I continue to be impressed — amazed, actually — by how personal the relationship is between a newspaper and its readers.
Whenever a newspaper becomes an integral part of your day — when you take the time to sit down with it, even if only for a few minutes — we know we’ve made a connection.
After listening, reading, hearing and talking to more than 500 of you over the past 10 days, I’m more convinced than ever that we still play an important role in your daily lives.
Overwhelmingly, the newer, smaller-pages newspaper we rolled out Aug. 1 works better for you. It’s easier to handle. It looks cleaner and you’re glad we made most of the changes we made, you said.
With a few important exceptions.
Of all the changes, the one that prompted the most comment was the daily crossword puzzle. No surprise there, actually. We hoped it would.
We decided that we owed it to crossword fans to make the puzzle larger and easier to read. Many readers, particularly those loyal ones who have been with us for years, had expressed concerns that the type was too small and it was getting harder to do.
So we made the new puzzle bigger. A lot bigger. “They’ll like this,” we predicted.
Many of you hated it.
Dozens of callers flooded the InsideAJC line on opening day of the new format to complain that the puzzle had been “dumbed down.” It was way too big, you said. Others believed we had actually shrunk the size of the clues.
We did neither. We rearranged the comics of the Journal and Constitution to spread each over two pages and, in doing so, cleared room for a larger puzzle. But in making the grid itself larger, we may have given the impression that we made the clues smaller.
The other who’d-a-thought-it discovery (at least for those of us who are not crossword enthusiasts) was this: Crossword aficionados equate the size of the puzzle to its difficulty in solving. In other words, they see large puzzles as less challenging than smaller ones. (That point was hammered home to me personally on Day 1 when my wife asked me if we had changed the puzzle so that it was aimed for her third-grade students.)
Last Monday we fixed it. The size of the puzzle shrank somewhat (it’s still larger than before the changes) and we bumped up the size of the type in the clues. By midweek, the complaints had stopped.
There were ancillary comics-page concerns that we also plan to address. Among them: Many of you don’t like the fact that we put the crossword and Jumble puzzles on opposite pages. On Monday, we’ll fix that.
But crossword enthusiasts were about evenly split on whether it was a good idea to put the solution to the puzzle in the paper on the same day.
Another common complaint about the changes involved the page numbers on the interior pages of each section. We created a white-on-black block of type for the page numbers that looked really sharp in our prototypes.
Prototyping a few hundred copies and actually printing a half million or so real editions are two different animals. The numbers were too hard to read, so we are adjusting it to make the letters and numbers larger.
These were small, but important adjustments that we wouldn’t have thought of without your input. Thanks for taking time to let us know how you feel — even if we did upset you by deciding to run the answers to the puzzles on the same day of publication.
In so many ways, the year-long planning effort for the new-sized newspaper paid off. Other newspapers that have made this switch over the past few years also had to implement draconian cuts in story lengths and photos to accommodate the smaller width of the page.
Our design team smartly started implementing different type faces and headline styles several months ago that actually recaptured virtually all of the space that would have otherwise been lost by shrinking the page.
They deserve the credit for preserving — even enhancing — the enjoyment of your daily visit to our pages.
