Advertising Age has an interview with Wall Street Journal publisher L. Gordon Crovitz on the WSJ’s upcoming redesign.

Changes will include versions of the front page’s “What’s News” feature in other sections, more articles on “what it means” and fewer on “what happened” and more themed content.

Their plans are still evolving — 20 focus groups have been conducted, and another 60 are scheduled to take place once the next Journal prototype arrives in June. But one thing’s for sure: Journal 3.0 will take its cues from the Internet. The newspaper has run The Wall Street Journal Online for 10 years, and the new print edition takes into account how the Web version continues to change consumers’ expectations.

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“Navigation and being able to benefit from content in context are very much themes of the digital age,” said Mr. Crovitz, who is also exec VP at Dow Jones, The Journal’s owner. “There is a great opportunity for the newspaper to help us overcome information overload by helping us, once a day, put the content in context.”

Of course, not all papers, especially smaller ones, can spend whatever the Journal is laying out for [Mario] Garcia and a parade of focus groups on a redesign, but all papers can take an unflinching look at their story forms, their design and their content mix with the purposing of asking the question: Is this serving the needs, desires and expectations of today’s web-conditioned readers?

There is, at last, a growing sense of urgency in the newspaper industry that change is inevitable not only to maintain social relevance but to preserve financial viability. Well-heeled papers like the Journal may lead the way on some sorts of change (although much of the most creative innovation is being done at smaller papers), but every newspaper now has the chance, and the excuse, for unlimited reinvention.

Incidentally, since we’re all about the minutiae of design around here, note for the record that about three months ago the Journal started putting skyboxes above the nameplate on its front page.

>L. Gordon Crovitz Ushers in Journal 3.0 [Advertising Age]
>Print 3.0: Lessons from the Web [First Draft]