Monty Cook, Baltimore Sun deputy managing editor/presentation & news editing, sends along this update on the Sun's redesign:

In the first two weeks after the launch, The Sun signed up more than 600 new subscribers as a result of a direct mail piece on the redesign to non-subscribers in the area. We are still tracking and hope to reach 1,000 new subscribers by the one-month anniversary of the launch, Oct. 19.

In the month since the launch, we have had 134 cancellations.

Single-copy sales continue to track upward since the launch, between 2 and 4 percent daily year-over-year against projections.

One of our favorite new starts comes by way of a Sept. 21 e-mail from a father named Andrew: "I am impressed. Even my 9-year-old son wants to read the newspaper now. Please sign me up for a subscription!"

Our readers, by a large margin, have not only accepted the design (we took just 1,700 phone calls and emails — positive and negative — in the first month) but are reading more. And as a newspaper, that's all you can hope for in an age where declining readership among the nation's newspapers seems to be expected and accompanies a kind of gloomy pall over the industry. The Sun isn't resigned to that. We're continuing to be aggressive in the way we approach attractinig new readrers through inventive storytelling while continuing to improve the design, editing, writing and coverage of the stories readers want most.