Redesigning a mid-sized paper
Wendt is no longer in the design chair like in years past, but rather he’s the guy making the tough choices, not only in design but every aspect of the paper. An advantage of that was being able to work closely with advertising, marketing and circulation on shaping the new identity of the HT.
But there was another big plus for Wendt.
“Because of the paper being smaller, we were able to pull everyone together a little easier than you could at a bigger paper,” he said. “The whole news staff was able to get behind the redesign, which is easier when you only have 65 people.”
The biggest goal of the redesign was to focus the content and drive local news, along with cleaning up the visuals. But the process offered a chance for the newsroom staff to start fresh with new goals because “it provides a leaping off point,” according to Wendt.
“Everyday on 1A we want to have one story that will lead you to feel like ‘I really learned something today and that’s why I get the Huntsville Times’,” Wendt said. “This [redesign] process allows us to look at stories we really value and how to get them in the paper.”
The basics
The paper’s circulation is 55,000 daily and 73,000 on Sunday. The HT produces nearly 20 special sections a year, with about two thirds of those dedicated to a Sunday college football called SEC Extra.
Matt Mansfield, the President of the Society for News Design and an associate professor at Medill in Washington, was the sole consultant and did the prototyping for the redesign, which started once Wendt took the job last July.
“It’s easy to work with somebody that you have worked with for so long,” Wendt said, referring to when the two were colleagues together at the San Jose Mercury News. “The shorthand we have together allowed us to work through email and over the phone.”
Typography was cleaned up — Miller (serif), Antenna (sans) and Receiver (slab) — along with an updated color palette and grid guidelines.
And when it came to building templates, Wendt wasn’t afraid to dust off his Quark skills and get involved in the designing.
“I really enjoy being hands-on, whether that is editing a story, designing a page or building a template. I like being a part of the execution. It all excites me at the same level,” Wendt said. “At a smaller paper, everyone is deployed on a daily basis, plus you throw in a voluntary buyout and some furlough days and it gets really tough to put out a daily paper, much less find time for other projects.”
Reorganizing the HT
Before the redesign, The HT had four sections during the week — main, local, features and sports. The redesign offered a chance to reorganize the paper in a more logical way for readers and to “get readers into a rhythm of reading the paper,” according to Wendt.
This started with combining the main and local sections into one. A3 now houses the Local News page every day, which allowed the HT to create a standalone business section that focuses on federal government programs based in the coverage area — mainly military operations and NASA activity — along with other local industries. Page A2, now called Ask Us, has become a daily destination page focusing on community tips and usability that readers are looking for (gas prices, lottery numbers, contacting the paper, etc.).
“Local news is our franchise. We are a local newspaper. It’s should be at the forefront of what we do,” Wendt said.
To that note, the paper has added a readers choice section that runs every Tuesday called The Best. The first one, which was about BBQ, received over 7,500 nominations. Readers can submit a ballot that is published in the paper or go online to nominate a favorite locale. Wendt pointed out that they have setup technology so readers can vote only once, so he was quite pleased with the initial turnout. “I was hoping for 1,000,” he said.
Other moves in the reorganization include renaming the daily feature sections by topic rather than by day, moving the paper’s Sunday opinion section into the A section and merging the Sunday feature sections of Life, Enjoy and Travel section into one section called enjoy!Sunday.
To learn more about the reorganization, click here for a video of Wendt.
Getting the word out
The launch of the redesigned HT offered Wendt and his colleagues a unique window: get the new product into non-subscribers hands in an effort to bring them into the paper. This would require about 90,000 extra papers to be printed, nearly tripling the daily run of the HT. Now, we are sure you are thinking that this would be a very expensive experiment, but the HT had a plan, one that was hatched within the last week.
The paper found “sponsorships” to help fund the extra printing cost. Each of these sponsorships included a full-page ad in today’s paper, along with the company’s logo on the marketing materials that were promoting the new product. “We were hoping for three sponsorships and got seven,” Wendt said.
And Tuesday is a day when there are already extra carriers working in circulation, so there was no added cost to delivering the paper.
It’s too soon to tell if the plan worked, but the initiative is very intriguing. Update will check back with Wendt in the coming weeks to see how the distribution plan has affected circulation.
Other HT notes
Web update: The paper hasn’t done anything yet with its Web site. “There is an upgrade to all of the Advance sites in the works,” Wendt said. But more importantly, Wendt added, was that technology needed to catch up to ambition in his newsroom.
New hire: Tim Ball, another former Merc colleague, recently was hired away from the Sun-Sentinel and should start soon in Huntsville. Wendt had high praise when asked about his newest hire. “The biggest thing is you want people who can push ideas and execute them. People who can design high-end news and feature pages, the ability to shoot pictures, make graphics and illustrations happen. And he’s been in the seat on big nights. He knows what big coverage and terrific presentation should be. … He can teach that energy level. There is another level that we can get to and Tim is a great addition to make that happen.”
Jon Wile is SND’s East Coast Metro regional director and a news designer at The Washington Post.
