Pioneer Press gets a face lift

The fast-acting staff at the Pioneer Press launched its redesign this morning. With about a six-month time frame, design editor Lauri Hopple, Amanda Willis and a team of others (including myself) made some changes. Please check it out at newsuem.com.

Please note that I will update my blog later today to show you the complete redesign.

Here’s what Pioneer Press Executive Editor Thom Fladung said about the redesign on today’s 1A. It pretty much sums up the goal.

The Pioneer Press we printed today is different in a couple of ways. And, depending on the edition you got, it may be changing further in the next few days. Some explanation:

– The paper is narrower. You’re not imagining it. We’ve changed to a page width that is becoming the newspaper industry standard, allowing us to use less paper.

– Some of you may have a paper that’s the same width as before, but with narrower stories. We had to make this conversion one printing press at a time. So, some people today will get newspapers on the old, wider paper. By Wednesday, we expect all papers to be in the new size.

– The paper looks different. Along with reducing its width, we took the opportunity to improve the look of the Pioneer Press and make it easier to use. So, for example, each section is now color-coded. We’ve anchored the popular shorter news stories from the many communities we cover on Page 2 of the Local section. We made the crossword puzzle on our comics pages bigger. And we’ve made various other changes to enhance readability.

We also didn’t change a lot of your paper:

– The size and typeface of the text did not change.

– The amount of space for stories, photos and other art is not changing. The pages got narrower, but by redesigning the page headings and making other adjustments, we were able to retain virtually all the news space we had in the wider version.

– Your favorite features are in the usual places. We didn’t move them around.

– We have the same number of channels and the same organization for our weekly TV section and the daily TV listings.

Most important, our commitment to intensely reported news from your communities and about your issues has not changed. We hope you’ll find the new look of the Pioneer Press to be fresh yet familiar. Please leave a comment below or call me at 651-228-5487.

— Thom Fladung, editor

Later today, I will post all section fronts and some examples of inside pages. As some of you may know, it’s hard to launch a redesign and mistakes are made. But as we get use to the new look with new styles, it’s only going to get better.

I will try to explain the process of how and why we made the decisions we made. This redesign was done on the fly. We didn’t have a lot of time to do focus groups and press tests. This was a fast push to modernize the Pioneer Press without completely reinventing it. So please stay tuned throughout the weeks and months as I share some of the successes and struggles we have with the Pioneer Press redesign.

In the meantime, please feel free to read some of the comments the Pioneer Press readers are saying. It should be noted that you may have to sign in at twincities.com to keep reading. Like all redesigns, most people who commented, don’t like it.