From the Editor: News Journal will look different next week

David Kennard
News Journal

Newspaper newsrooms are typically pretty chaotic places, but in the past week our folks have been especially anxious.

Today’s paper will be the last of its kind — of sorts.
Remodeling a newspaper is a little like remodeling a house — design, demolition and then reconstruction.

The design and demolition phases went pretty well, but it’s the reconstruction phase that takes the longest.

Next Sunday we hope to bring you a thicker paper with more features and news.

Sunday has always been our biggest effort, so this is a project that we hope will follow that model. And for the first time in a long time, your paper will actually grow bigger. That is virtually unheard of in this era of vanishing newspapers.

When you first open the paper, you will immediately notice a bigger A section. This will be filled with local news, opinions and a new feature we are calling our Issue One Page.

From week to week this will contain important news of a national scope, but with local impact.
That will be followed immediately by the Community Conversation section that has become such a popular part of the paper over the last few years.

We are leaving the Sports section alone, although with additional pages, we hope to have an opportunity to bring you more of it.

In the Lifestyles section, you’ll find all the same features you’ve told us you enjoy. Additionally you find some other features that we’ve been working on — some brand new and some we’ve dug from our archives.

That’s a quick overview of what you’ll see in coming weeks. And as we move into this period of slow economic growth, we hope to tweak things even more to make your paper a better value.

David Kennard is managing editor of the News Journal. You can contact him at dkennard@gannett.com or 419-521-7204.