As we slumber in this hemisphere, the World Editors Forum is hopping over in Seoul, and much blogging about it is going on at editorsweblog.org. Speakers include El Mundo's Alberto Cairo, VisualEditors.com's Robb Montgomery, Mario Garcia, Die Welt's Jan-Eric Peters, Joi Ito, Dan Gillmor and more. Also, Robb has pictures (one of which is above) here.

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In the wake of the big Eurovote, here are some Monday front pages from France (except that's a Tuesday front page for Le Monde, as they take les weekends off, huge government-altering news or not).

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The Detroit Newspaper Agency's decision to wrap Wednesday's editions of the Detroit Free Press and Detroit News in the flag, or, more accurately, a four-page Marshall Field's ad that looked like a flag, has successfully annoyed everybody from designers to copy editors to CJR-types to actual real readers.

There may be a precedent for a capitulation as crassly commercial as this one, but if there is, our minds have mercifully blocked it out. - CJR Daily

Hell, newspapers have just as much right to make money money as anyone else. But, in this instance, a line has definitely been crossed. ... a line in what the local newspapers represent in our community. That's not to say they can't earn it back, but on the heels of the Mitch Al-Bomb scandal and the revolting way that Carole Leigh Hutton handled the results of investigation, your Uncle Grambo would say that hill just got a little bit steeper. - Uncle Grambo, whatevs.org

What galled me about the honor-box photo was that the only thing visible from outside the box was the American-flag design. It's not until you had put in your four bits (or however much that thing costs), your cockles warmed by this wonderful patriotic gesture by the newspaper, that you'd discover you'd been rooked by a farging Marshall Field's ad. - Testy Copy Editors

I know we're desperate for ad revenue, but I don't think these ideas are being very well thought out. It's the typical focus on the short term without worrying about the future. - VisualEditors.com

I see that the Free Press put their profit for selling this wraparound ad before the true meaning of Memorial Day and what it really stands for. I don't think that those who sacrificed their lives for this country ever expected their day of remembrance to be justification for a store to hold a "sale" in their honor. - Free Press reader

Update: Here's an image of the Freep's ad front from E&P. Also, Henry S. Ford, vice president of market development of the Detroit Newspaper Agency, told E&P: “It just seemed like nothing far off field from a gatefold or a wrap.” And in a letter to Romenesko he said, "Initial reader response has been positive." I guess the Freep forgot to publish those letters!

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Jonathon Berlin, editor of the Society for News Design's quarterly Design magazine, sends along this remembrance of Peter Palazzo by Lou Silverstein set to appear in Design's next issue, hitting mailboxes in the next month or so. (It's the "How To Issue" with 13 tutorials on everything from how to use color, to how to write headlines for a tabloid, to how to write the Wall Street Journal's news summary, to how to make a wood-cut illustration. All copy machine friendly!)

A true classic

Peter Palazzo changed newspapers with his innovative designs

By Louis Silverstein
From SND Design Journal, No. 95, publishing summer 2005

Writing about Peter Palazzo comes easy to me. Our lives were intertwined sometimes tightly, sometimes more loosely, for over 50 years. We followed parallel career paths and we were good friends - a friendship that spread to include our families. Pete was my daughter's godfather, a fact that he made much of, introducing himself at times to mutual friends as "the Godfather." Pete is best remembered of course for his sensational work on the New York Herald Tribune, probably the most dramatically innovative body of graphic design that helped fuel the revolution in newspaper design of the 1960s and 1970s. The Trib had its own competitive marketing problems at the time, but it also embodied the powerful forces of change that affected the entire industry. These included: the advent of television competition; the early technological rumblings of photo composition and of the computer age; the post World War II expansion of markets into the suburbs with the growing role of women in our society and of sports and entertainment; and the decline of the mass circulation magazines like Life and Look.

Conspicuously, in those days, newspapers remained the only one of the major media outlets not to employ professional designers or art directors in their regular operation. The Trib, like most U.S. newspapers, was marked by formats of rigid columns of type and a severely limited approach to graphic possibilities, exercised basically through amateur graphic efforts by editors and photo personnel.

Pete's designs for the Trib were a bombshell that hastened the graphic revolution to come. Timothy Leland, editor of The Boston Globe, is quoted as saying that the Tribune "was possibly the best-looking English language newspaper ever published."

There is no doubt he was a huge influence on his whole generation - editors as well as designers- and on editors and designers who followed, leaders of whom are working with the expansive newspaper palette we see today. Editors who worked with him, some of them legendary in their own right, are consistent in their praise for Pete. David Hall, former editor of The (Cleveland) Plain Dealer, injected an unusual note of praise with his comment, "You have my admiration for your professional skills and humane approach to newspaper design."

Pete's pages remain electrifying even today after decades of artistic and technological advances in the industry. His designs were forceful, yet surprisingly restrained and elegant. But beyond design, I believe, he expanded the very idea of basic newspaper journalism to include images created for publication, something considered legitimate for advertising and magazines but not for a daily newspaper.

This was only one aspect of the graphic magazine and promotion sensibility he brought to the job of newspaper journalism. Other aspects of his sensibility had to do with typography - the fonts and processes were the same for everybody, but in Pete's hands newspaper display type became elegant in a way even high-quality magazines failed to achieve. His section fronts were blockbusters - each featured usually a single photo image simple and compelling (his travel section photos could have come from a prize-winning ad campaign).

The section head - scaled just right and centered in a horizontal box - sat across the top of the page. The photo usually made up all the rest of the page, taking advantage of the generous dimensions of the broadsheet size. Of course, special sections of newspapers at that time habitually devoted much of their creative effort to "designed" fronts, but almost always they tended to be over-designed and without any relation to the rest of the paper. Pete's designs, in contrast, despite their graphic roots in advertising, magazines and fine typography, actually added to the journalistic impact of the paper. They were so direct, so forthright, so graphically on target, so "right," that they conveyed the essence of whatever the story was, certainly with an impact no newspaper before had been able to achieve.

Book World and the Herald Tribune magazine New York were particular showcases of his typographical mastery, the cursive "New York" logo still surviving at present as one of the outstanding magazine logos. At its inception, the cursive Caslon letters made a uniquely original appearance at a time when the vogue was for Helvetica and the newer slab serifs. Before making his mark at the Trib, Pete had already made a splash as art director for the high-fashion maker of shoes, I. Miller, and later before going to the Trib, as creative director for Henry Bendel, a boutique department store on New York's Fifth Avenue. Pete's shoe ads became instantly recognizable for their fresh look and touch of graphic wit, standing out in the competitive fashion advertising field. In usually half-page ad spaces in The New York Times, he used drawings by a New York illustrator named Andy Warhol.

This was just before Warhol burst onto the art scene with his Campbell Soup cans as a pop art icon. The drawings were in Warhol's characteristic blotted line, sometimes decorative, and Pete would fill the entire ad with a single shoe, the ad copy a very subdued compliment. The ads, like his later work at the Trib, became instant classics.

I first met Pete when we both worked for the Publication Branch of the U.S. State Department, then located on Times Square. Jane Jacobs, the celebrated author of "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" was one of the editors; the executive art director was Herb Roan, a prodigy in the New York magazine scene. I art directed the Russian language magazine called "Amepuka" ("America") and Pete art directed the Yugoslav version. Herb Roan was an inspirational and volatile art director, from whom we learned that designing was one thing and fighting for the integrity of a design was another, often almost as important. I think that Pete's strength in fighting for his design convictions in the closed atmosphere of big city newsrooms might be traceable to exposure to Herb Roan.

Pete's demeanor was casual, relaxed and low key. He was the opposite of your hard sell kind of person. Even his body language was casual. One of his attractive traits was an off-hand, slightly humorous manner that belied the aggressive ideas he was capable of hatching and covered up the iron resolution I'm certain he needed to put through his radically innovative ideas. In the 1960s a large newspaper newsroom was not the place to look for open minds receptive to bold visual ideas. He must have shown enormous confidence and mastery to push through his designs at the Herald Tribune.

Even more unusual are designs he produced at a later date for the Chicago Sun-Times. Here, one of Pete's devices was to gather together the several photos that normally ran here and there on the front page, and group them together as a single dominant halftone mass on the page, leaving the type - headlines and text - to flow around as a fluid, contrasting mass. This I felt at the time was even more revolutionary than his work at the Trib, I marveled at the resolution he must have shown, under his casual manner, to "sell" such radical ideas to newspaper editors of the '60s.

I often felt that Pete enjoyed in his Italian heritage an advantage as a designer denied to most of the rest of us. I was told, when a child, that I had inherited my penchant for art from my grandmother who was a craftsman and carpenter. But Pete's genes, I felt, carried with them the influence of Cellini, Palladio and the marvelous craftsmen of Florence and Rome. In his unfailing good taste, and his uncanny ability to combine the boldest of ideas with the most delicate and tasteful execution, almost everything he did had, I believe, the look of a "classic," indeed invoking for me the work of the Renaissance and classic masters. Even his business letterhead had this authoritative look. A single line of Caslon Heavy sat boldly in the middle of the page. Not a gimmick in sight. But Caslon never looked so modern and classic at the same time.

After years of little contact, my wife and I visited Pete and his lovely new wife Danielle at their house in Lake George, in the Adirondacks. He had suffered serious bouts of illness but was clearly a relaxed, content man in a house on a steep hill that seemed like a mountain retreat. Predictably, there were numerous design solutions in evidence that had the Palazzo touch - efficient, simple, unpretentious, well crafted, nothing in excess. The house enjoyed a second floor three-sided verandah overlooking the lake. In his casual, understated manner Pete didn't talk about his last big newspaper commission at The (Cleveland) Plain Dealer, where he had designed a typeface-"Palazzo"-for the paper. Instead he spoke of Danielle's garden and his enjoyment of life in this out of-the-way place. As always his "glory days" of enormous influence were something he carried with him on the inside and very lightly.

Louis Silverstein played a key part in the modern look of The New York Times. He worked for the company for over 30 years in many titles including assistant managing editor for visual design.

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Design consultant Tony Sutton alerts me to a PDF he's created of an interview he did with legendary newspaper designer Peter Palazzo in 1995. While you're there, poke around a bit. A lot of interesting stuff there, including a typographic journey around Norwich, England with Nick Shinn and Sutton's address to the Scandinavian Society for News Design "Why Are Your Newspapers So Dull And Boring?"

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The Patriot-News in Harrisburg, Pa., (Newhouse, 102,710 daily, 151,583 Sunday) on May 19 launched a tabloid edition of the paper, giving readers a choice between the broadsheet (above) and a compact version.

The compact edition, known as "The Patriot," is published Monday through Friday and condenses the news from the broadsheet into a quick, colorful version aimed at busy readers.

As Executive Editor David Newhouse tells it, editor and publisher John Kirkpatrick was inspired by a Malcolm Gladwell story about condiments. "Why not give consumers a choice, as they have in almost everything else?" Newhouse says. "You know the sad thing? Our industry is so conservative that this seems like a radical idea, rather than a 'duh'."

Kirkpatrick's epiphany about choice is similar to one that Independent editor Simon Kelner had before his newspaper began offering compact and broadsheet versions in 2003: "I was buying toothpaste and I saw you could buy a big tube, a small tube, all sizes -- why not do the same with the newspaper? A newspaper is the only product whose shape and size is dictated by the producer and not the consumer." The Independent, however, dropped the broadsheet entirely about eight months later, and Kelner allowed as how too much choice could perhaps be confusing.

The Patriot began at 56 pages and may run up to 64, says Kris Strawser, assistant managing editor/visuals. The cover will lean local, with a "main window" that will usually be local, unless big national or world news dictates otherwise. The cover will be generally restrained. The area could tolerate a brash cover, but, Strawser says, "I'm looking for a slightly more elegant tab. I'm not looking for the big, gritty 'thwack.'"

And it'll be newsy. A more entertainment-oriented cover didn't fly with focus groups, she says. Readers wanted news and a more serious treatment. "They said, 'Don't insult us with anything else.' "

The compact, like the broadsheet, in available for home delivery, and Newhouse says reader reaction has been "very, very enthusiastic," thought it's too early to draw any circulation or advertising conclusions. And although there was some internal mythbusting ("They're dumbing down the newspaper." "This is terrible for photographers."), "I've actually been surprised by the amount of encouragement and excitement in the newsroom."

The first five pages are open, offering a chance to use rails and other vertical elements to set a tone and help offset the relative "squatness" of the 11.5" x 12.5" pages before the ad-stack pages begin. The Sports section in the broadsheet was converted to tabloid last summer, so it just gets some slight adjusting for the compact version.

Typographically, The Patriot uses Poynter Gothic Text, Poynter Old Style Display and some Benton Gothic.

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I guess there were several ways you could go on your front page with the Saddam-in-his-undies story this weekend.

1. You could not mention it, like The New York Times.

2. You could run a story, but no photo, like The Philadelphia Inquirer.

3. You could run a photo of another newspaper's front page (twice!) and a headline about how the U.S. government's pissed off about the photos being published, like Stars and Stripes, a paper published by, er, the U.S. government.

4. You could just damn the torpedos and proudly run the photo and a snarky headline, like the New York Post.

5. You could get in touch with your inner 13-year-old, like the Beaver County (Pa.) Times.

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Rosecrans Baldwin and Andrew Womack, editors of The Morning News, a fine site you should all read every day, have kindly honored this site in their 2005 Editors’ Awards for Online Excellence.

Favorite Writing About Design

We admitted that we’re web geeks; well, before we were web geeks, we were news geeks, and in particular, newspaper geeks. The only thing better than reading a paper at the end of the day with our feet up is reading a paper at the end of the day with our feet up and a bottle of Lagavulin on the table. Newspapers are dying? Over our dead bodies, and only when people like Mark Friesen at Newsdesigner stop publishing thoughtful talk about the business.

Wow! Thanks, guys. It's folks like you and the many, many other non-newspaper-industry readers I've picked up that give me hope about the future of ink on paper.

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On May 18, 1980, a massive earthquake-caused landslide caused Mount St. Helens in Southwest Washington to explode, blasting 1,312 feet off the top of the 9,677 foot mountain. The blast killed nearly every living thing in a 212 square mile area. The explosion and resulting mudflows also killed 57 people and destroyed nearly 200 homes.

Naturally, this was a huge news story, especially in the Northwest. Here's how a few of the newspapers in the area played it the next day.

The Oregonian, about 50 miles from the peak, is the nearest large daily. The Daily News is in Longview, Wash., only about 40 miles from the volcano. The 27,500-circulation daily, with a staff of 29, doggedly covered the story, publishing 420 stories in the first two weeks and 2,200 in the first year. In 1981 the Daily News was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for local spot news reporting, with special mention given to the photographs by Roger A. Werth, who took the picture on the front page. As always, click on the above images to enlarge, but to see an even larger 1000-pixel wide scan of The Oregonian cover, click here.

Here's a double truck the Daily News ran May 19. The paper has a site with many of the stories, photographs and pages they published after the eruption.

The Oregon Journal of Portland and Capital Journal of Salem, Ore., were PM's and since the mountain erupted on a Sunday morning, they didn't get their first crack at the story until Monday afternoon. Extra large versions of these covers are here and here.

And here are a few Northwest papers and their anniversary front pages.

The Oregonian and The Columbian of Vancouver, Wash. One of the eruption's victims, 27-year-old Reid Blackburn, was a Columbian staff photographer. Those are his glasses in the centerpiece.

The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

The News Tribune of Tacoma and the Spokesman-Review of Spokane. The ash from the eruption went generally east, hitting the area around Spokane the hardest.

The Statesman Journal of Salem, Ore., and The Register-Guard of Eugene, Ore.

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From West 43rd Street today comes this New York Times page from April 14, 1996, and this quote from, well, much earlier: "The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun." — Ecclesiastes

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So The New York Times unveiled its redesigned Business Day section today, and an alert reader noted that the centerpiece looks a whole lot like something the Wall Street Journal did on May 11, 2004. Curious!

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Look at all that white space and extry leading and wide copy width! Almost thought they dropped the Orange County Register on my front porch Sunday morning. Good to see a little bit of the fine inside-section design creeping out to the Times' Holy Page One.

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The Indianapolis Star (Gannett, 254,000 daily/357,000 Sunday) begins a "rolling" redesign today, debuting some new features and typography. Scott Goldman, Assistant Managing Editor/Visuals, writes:

This is the first major step of a "rolling" redesign we'll be implementing over the next few weeks. The end result will be based on three font families, all from Hoefler & Frere-Jones — Gotham, which began its run as our lede headline font today, Chronicle as the serif and our new agate and graphic font, Retina.

The biggest change is what we're calling "J1M" — for "Just 1 Minute" — a bottom strip that's highly visual, loaded with quick-hitting, notebook-type items and made quite an impact with our readers group earlier this year. The J1Ms run on Metro, Sports, Business and Living every day, and will reduce us to four-story maximums on our covers and more often, 3-story covers.

The Star staff accomplished the switch on a quick turnaround. Although prototypes had been around a while, the Just 1 Minute rails were were approved a couple weeks ago, and the headline typography change was only given the green light on Thursday. Yow.

Here are some new pages with old ones (on the left) for comparison.

Here's a closer look at a couple of those "J1M's":

The images of the new pages and other info was provided by Mr. Tim Ball, to whom many thanks are due, as are congratulations on his recent promotion to news design director. w00t!

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Subjecting a newspaper or parts thereof to a focus group — such as before a redesign or the launch of a new section — is nothing new. But the Chicago Tribune is taking it another step, the Chicago Sun-Times reports, using an online group to get feedback on specific pages, photos and headlines before publication.

While most of what the focus group sees has already run in the paper, the Tribune has tested photographs, layouts and headlines before publication, sources said. The group does not see the text of stories before publication.

"You sort of do it to take the temperature out there. But I don't know of any editor who's been told, 'Whatever they say, that's what we do,'" said Denise Joyce, editor of the paper's Q section.

OK, interesting enough. But at the end of the story there's this:

Mary Ann Weston, an associate professor of journalism at Northwestern University, noted newspapers have long used market research. But the Tribune's latest foray "seems to be taking market research to a whole different level."

Whether or not it was ethical "would depend on what they do with the information they get," and whether the focus group was limited to a certain sector of the population.

Zing! Cross-town cheap shot headed toward Tribune Tower! "Whether or not it was ethical"? C'mon. Talking to your mother can be unethical, depending on what you do with the information you get. And now you're supposed to clear the composition of your focus groups with the stern-faced Northwestern ethics cops now? Who knew?

>Tribune using online focus groups before paper appears in print [Chicago Sun-Times]

For those of you who don't follow the comments in older posts, I had to pull this one out. In the discussion of last week's item on British tabs, someone referred to them as "screeching harpies." This brought a thundering response today from Richard Wallace, editor of the Daily Mirror.

Screeching harpies? Absolutely. Our newspapers make no bones about our political persuasions or sociological viewpoints, a lesson perhaps the mainstream US media needs to learn as we all face the onslaught of insta-media (most of it heavily politicised/attitudinal). The NYT breathtakingly embarrassing navel-gazing is symptomatic of a US newspaper industry that has been wrong-footed by the screeching harpies of Murdoch's Fox/Post and the current occupants of the White House....See you at the barricades!
Richard Wallace, Editor, Daily Mirror

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Hey, fellow newspaperpersons! Let's give a Norwegian brother a hand. Erik Bolstad of the Norwegian Broadcast Corp. is doing some translation work and wants to know what you call those little words above the headline. In Norwegian it's a "stikktittel." Perhaps you call them "labels" or "overlines" or even "Harrowers" (after that design consultant that made you use them all the time). I usually call them "kickers," but I gotta say, "stikktittel" has a ring to it.

What do you call them? Put 'em in the comments.

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Alert reader Brian Cubbison points out that Business Wire has released "early stage mock-ups" of what a compact Wall Street Journal could look like.

Wow! Look at that big color photo!

Here's what they look like now.

Thanks, Brian!

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The New York Times and International Herald Tribune weigh in with stories on the Wall Street Journal tab conversions in their Monday editions.

Both stories note that, beginning next year, the conversion will save Dow Jones $17 million a year. The Times story quotes ever-present consultants John Morton and Mario Garcia, with Morton saying that advertisers may demand reduced ad rates at first.

"A conversion is not a painless transition," Mr. Morton said. European papers that made the switch had rate reductions "on the order of 20 percent, but most eventually made it up with increased circulation and were able to gradually raise rates."

The Herald Tribune notes that the differing sizes of U.S. and international editions could complicate global ad sales, but also says that the international editions will, for the first time, carry front-page color advertisements.

The Times also notes:

The current 24-page broadsheets will be converted to 36 to 40 tabloid pages, said a Journal spokesman, Robert H. Christie. The change will save on newsprint but will also reduce the space available for news content by as much as one-third.

Also, Christie told me today that the redesign will be handled by WSJ Design Director Joe Dizney and an outside consulting firm. Christie hasn't yet gotten back to me with the name of the firm.

>Journal sets fall date for new format [International Herald Tribune]
>Abroad, The Wall Street Journal Will Be a Tabloid [The New York Times]

In addition to Mario Garcia's comments, I've solicited a few more reactions to the Wall Street Journal's overseas move to tabloid format.

Design consultant Alan Jacobson of Brass Tacks Design is a skeptic about tabloid conversions.

I don't understand why EVERYONE DOESN'T GET IT.

It's not about format or readers. IT'S ABOUT ADVERTISING.

Papers overseas makes 1/3 to 1/2 less of their revenue from advertising than U.S. papers. So switching to tab doesn't hurt them as much, even if the format change reduces advertising revenue.

We can't do that in the U.S. — it would be too costly.

Now here's what I want to see - research saying that advertisers and readers want their traditional, monopoly, general interest newspaper converted to tab.

All the research I've collected is absolutely to the contrary.

Robb Montgomery, news design editor of the Chicago Sun-Times and a founding editor of Red Streak, is more enthusiastic.

In December 2004 the Wall Street Journal published a story that I promoted in a VizEds post: under the headline "WSJ: Want to boost Circulation? Go Tabloid."

This Tab conversion news seems to support the notion that the paper's executive staff believes their own reporting.

Now, there is no point in going TAB if you aren't willing to embace the presentation, writing and editing techniques that make stories come alive on tab spreads. Short stories, scannable text, tight graphics, breakouts, sidebars, color, good promotional devices, etc.

This is just my short list of the many ingredients that go into creating a page-turning paper that readers will embrace.

A smart editing strategy combined with an effective tabloid design can serve both time-starved readers as well as those who also enjoy compelling longer narratives.

(Incidentally, Garcia and Montgomery will join Jan-Eric Peters, editor of Die Welt, Welt Kompakt and Berliner Morgenpost, and George Brock, Saturday Editor of The Times of London in a session titled "Tabloid fever: is the temperature going down?" at the 12th World Editors Forum in Seoul on May 31.)

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Eric Pfanner at the International Herald Tribune gets the scoop on a rumor I've been trying to run down all week. The Wall Street Journal is considering converting its European and Asian editions to tabloid format.

Officials at The Journal did not respond to requests for comment Friday. But several people close to the newspaper said that an announcement could come as soon as Monday, with the actual shift in the size of the paper occurring later. Another cost-cutting option under discussion, one person said, was increased sharing of content between the European and Asian editions. ...

By moving to the tabloid size, The Journal might be able to cut costs in several ways. The amount of newsprint needed for a tabloid is often less than for a broadsheet, even if the number of pages is higher. Also, The Journal's current shape is unusually wide, even for a broadsheet, requiring special press configurations; switching to a more conventional format would help save money on print runs.

Word I've heard is that it may happen by the end of the summer.

Update 08:30, 5/8: They announced it today. It'll happen Oct. 17.

HONG KONG/LONDON/NEW YORK (May 8, 2005) — The Wall Street Journal today announced a set of global initiatives to better serve its international readers and advertisers.

These initiatives include reformatting its Asian and European editions on Oct. 17 into an easier-to-read, convenient and accessible compact format; combining the Asian and European print editions with the award-winning The Wall Street Journal Online at WSJ.com to better serve the needs of highly mobile international business leaders; pursuing a new, more targeted circulation strategy focused on C-suite executives; and making a number of related personnel promotions and reassignments. The combination of a compact format, plus the full content of The Wall Street Journal Online — the largest paid subscription news site on the Web — will offer readers a more convenient daily package of more news in more ways that better suits how busy readers use news today.

Frederick Kempe, editor and associate publisher of The Wall Street Journal Europe, will return to New York to become assistant managing editor, international.

"Our international readers need an authoritative, daily analysis of global business in a form that's readily accessible and available — no matter where they are," added Mr. Kempe. "Building on the established success of the compact newspaper concept in Europe, we'll continue to offer the same award-winning, Journal — quality reporting and writing but packaged in a more convenient format. We'll continue to build on our unsurpassed capabilities to provide concise focus on the main stories driving global business our readers won't find anywhere else."

In response, Mario Garcia e-mails:

This is incredibly interesting news, and it shows that the move towards compact conversions is real, not a trendy flash in the pan. This is a win-win situation for The WSJ and its readers in busy European and Asian capitals. We knew when we redesigned those editions to introduce color four years ago that even the savviest business readers have little time to devote to their newspaper, so a compact format that forces editors to edit, to trim, to select, will be most welcome. Classic compacts allow an editor to have both the substance and the fizz. Everyone wins.

No word yet on who's working on this remake. Consultants, start your engines!

>The Wall Street Journal Strengthens Its International Editions [DowJones.com]

>Wall Street Journal may shift to tabloid overseas [International Herald Tribune]

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The British redtops, in the runup to the election, look a bit like a Fark Photoshop contest today. Crikey!

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The Record of Stockton, Calif., (Dow Jones, 60,000 daily circ.) launched a redesign on Sunday. It's a Garcia Media joint, headed by Mario Garcia and Garcia Media Creative Director Kelly Frankeny with Record Presentation Editor Ryan Becker.

The new design sports a "3-Minute Record," visual briefs, color navigation, layered information and new typography. The face for headlines, decks and flags is Hoefler & Frere-Jones' Chronicle Display with Knockout for graphics, navigation, agate, etc. Body copy is Font Bureau's Poynter Old Style Text.

The new, modernized flag is based on Chronicle, and is, they say, "wine" colored. Whether it's a Cabernet or Merlot or what is unclear. Maybe a nice Chianti.

Garcia said in a press release:

"We always take great pleasure in the rethinking of regional newspapers like the Record. Readers of these papers appreciate all that goes into them, read them from cover to cover, and bring a sense of community and belonging that sometimes is not there in the larger metropolitan dailies."

In addition, The Record got a sparkly new TKS offset press to replace the 49-year-old Goss letterpress.

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Whoops!

>Cover stories [Boston Globe via Romenesko]

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The New York Times reports today that Barron's, the weekly newsprint financial magazine, will introduce a redesign on May 16. The goal is to help the publication's 300,000 subscribers navigate more quickly through the content.

For help in engineering the quicker read, Barron's turned to Milton Glaser and Walter Bernard, who oversaw the magazine's last redesign in 1994. They reduced the magazine to two sections, shortened the stories, ran text down the middle of the page and surrounded it with bits of information: a summary of the story at the top, a chart or graph, and a box called "The Bottom Line" with a one- or two-sentence synopsis. They also added more white space, a phrase that Mr. Glaser said made editors and writers nervous because "they think they have been displaced by nothing."

The result looks something like a Web page. But the designers said that was not their goal.

"Were we thinking of the Internet? No," said Mr. Bernard, who is 67 (Mr. Glaser is 75). "We were just looking for clarity."

>Venerable Barron's Changing Its Look For a Speedier Read [The New York Times]

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In the April issue of the Society for News Design's Update newsletter (PDF), judges of the recent SND contest were asked to share what trends they saw in the entrants. One of the news and sports judges, Marcy Mangels of The (White Plains, N.Y.) Journal News, said:

The most annoying trend was the obvious copying of a technique or gimmick. There were several papers with GIANT fingerprints used as icons in cold case kind of stories.

Oops! Sorry, Marcy!