Recent design and content changes to The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal signal a growing newspaper trend. "Papers won't go more than three years without improving and enhancing what they
have going," says Mario Garcia, president/CEO of Garcia Media, a leading newspaper design firm. "There had been a period of ten to twenty years without evolutionary change. Now it will be happening
constantly."
The Times added Escapes on Fridays, its first new theme section since 1998. The Journal added Personal Journal, a new thematic section on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays. It also
instituted numerous design changes.
Garcia Media was responsible for redesigning the Journal. Garcia says his company has redesigned 450 papers in 29 years, most recently The Charlotte Observer,
the Las Vegas Review-Journal and the San Jose Mercury News, all among the nation's leading papers. Next up, The San Francisco Examiner, which will become a tabloid on May 17 after a Garcia Media
redesign.
Many of the design changes are instituted to simply make newspapers easier to read or navigate. Tom Tozer, deputy managing editor of the Charlotte Observer, says, "Our goal was to make
the paper easier to navigate with more things anchored in the paper, more utility for readers, more indexing and summary break out boxes."
John Kimball, chief marketing officer of The Newspaper
Association of America, says navigability is important because "it makes the product easier for the reader to get through and understand what's there."
He also says making a paper easier to read
"brings in more advertisers." Garcia agrees that advertising is one of the most important areas of many redesigns. "In all my projects I address advertising," he says. "It's one of the most
revolutionary areas for change."
Garcia says advertising placement is one of the things that might change. "We begin to see it placed in areas where it's never been before," he says, "from the
front page to a place on the page that's not in the basement. Advertising will rise to the top and you will find premium advertising in areas of navigation, like the index of a newspaper. You might
have a branding ad in the middle of an index area."
Garcia says these kinds of advertising placement changes are already taking place in European and Scandinavian newspapers, not so much in
American ones. The Charlotte Observer says it "realigned all ad stacks to form a more reasonable relationship between news and advertising content." The Journal's major advertising change in its
redesign was the increased availability of color positions. Garcia says the increased use of color will be "the most revolutionary change in newspaper advertising over the next five years."
Newspaper design and content changes are coming at a vulnerable time for the newspaper industry. With newspaper readership down slightly and advertising down slightly more over the past two years,
the industry needs to take action to confront its losses. "The economy favors the idea of placing advertising in new places," Garcia says. So look for new innovations in this area for newspapers in
the near future.