Charles Apple

The AmericanNews of Aberdeen launched a redesign last Thursday.  The AmericanNews is a 17,000-circulation daily in northeastern South Dakota. Formerly a Knight-Ridder paper, it’s one of the small dailies McClatchy sold to Schurz Communications.

Left: A front page from April. Right: Thursday’s debut front.
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According to the guy who redesigned it — Norfolk-based consultant Alan Jacobson — The AmericanNews…

…has a very small staff which is even smaller now after recent staff cuts  - just three full-time news reporters, two photographers, a handful of copyeditors, and of course, no designers.

They’re also saddled with a primitive front-end system from DTI called PageSpeed, so they can’t use InDesign or QuarkXPress.

Despite this dearth of resources, response to the redesign has been stronger and better than most redesigns - more than 50 comments in the first two days.

Alan says the comments on the redeisgn are running 50/50, with most of the complaints being about the reduced body copy. But Alan didn’t reduce the size of the body copy, he notes.

A closer look at Thursday’s front.
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Alan continues:

The most important feature of the redesign is the stack of digest items on the right side of the front page. This is not to be confused with the typical front-page rail of promos, as appeared in the old design. Instead, the stack contains self-contained digest items which emphasize small town news from the Aberdeen’s far-flung and remarkably large circulation area.

The goal of these digest items is to help the residents of these very small towns to feel connected.

Friday’s front.
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This entry was posted on Monday, November 17th, 2008 at 10:04 am and is filed under Innovative ideas, News design, Newspapers, Redesigns, Small papers, VizEds Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.