Mario won't have to worry about that mortgage payment for a little while, at least. A memo posted at VisualEditors.com says he's signed on to help with the redesign of the KC Star slated for late 2005 or so.

But Garcia Media won't be doing this alone. In fact the bulk of the work will be done by The Star's newsroom. Virtually every one of you will be involved in this effort in some manner over the next several months. With Mario on board, we will begin to develop several standing committees of newsroom staffers and employees from throughout The Star to help us navigate through the endless design, typography, training, content and promotional issues involved in a redesign of this scale. We also will discuss, craft and distribute our editorial goals for the new Star. In conversations already with department heads and others, we know we want it to be visually surprising. We want it to be functional - as easy to use and navigate as any paper in America. It must be even more targeted to readers, both geographically through zoning and demographically through content. It must be interactive, tying in our online site in a more consistent and sophisticated way. We need for it to be easy to maintain, but flexible enough to update. It should include a great many content improvements - which are much more important for long-term readership success than any design element. And finally, it should reflect our community, visibly and intrinsically. It should look and feel like The Kansas City Star, not a paper from another community.

>Kansas City Star redesign [VisualEditors.com]