You can call it a New Year’s resolution, spring (semester) cleaning or, simply, a minor redesign, but we’ve made the decision to spruce up the newspaper’s appearance this semester. The changes are inconspicuous to most readers — changed fonts, a different sports rail and unique spacing on our opinion page — but together they change the way you read our newspaper.
The most drastic change we instituted beginning in Monday’s newspaper is redesigning our “jump” page. We moved it further inside the newspaper — to page four — in order to get more eyes on our other inside stories. We also added headlines on our jump pages to explain what you can expect to read in the remainder of our front page stories.
A journalism professor who often critiques our newspaper jokes that our “jump” page — journalism jargon for the page on which the unfinished portions of front-page articles run — looked like the Gobi Desert, bereft of beauty and lacking life. We hope these changes have remedied that problem.
The improvements aren’t limited to the inside of the newspaper. Perhaps the most outwardly noticeable change is one we made to our baseline, which is an imaginary grid that ensures content is lined up straight across each of every page’s six columns. In layman’s terms, we made the baseline shallower, freeing up space for more words, photos and graphics on every page.
We’ve also begun to use more subheadlines, which are meant to elaborate headlines to give readers a better idea of what they’re about to learn in a given story.
Lastly, we’ve moved reporters’ email addresses from the beginning of their stories to the end of them. After all, you’re probably not going to be moved to send us an email after reading only the first several sentences of a given story.
It’s important for us to continually improve our print product while also focusing on the increasingly important digital realm (Spoiler: Our new website is soon to come). We’re excited about these small but important changes, and we hope you enjoy them as well.
Have any feedback about the design of the newspaper? Hit us up.
Editorials represent the majority opinion of The Post’s executive editors.
