By the Bay, getting rid of the gray

API's Phil Nesbitt redesigns two small papers for Chesapeake Publishing Corp.

By Curt Hazlett |

Even so, change is coming. Parts of the Eastern Shore are a relatively short drive from the urban centers of Washington and Baltimore, and the population is growing as newcomers discover the area’s charm and beauty.

Chesapeake Publishing Corp. sees it happening. The publisher of two dailies and more than a dozen weeklies and monthlies, the company is trying to find ways to serve new arrivals better while continuing to satisfy longtime readers.

Nowhere was the need more urgent than at Chesapeake’s Record Observer, in Queen Anne’s County, and Times-Record, in Caroline County. Both 3,500-circulation broadsheet weeklies compete against the company’s daily Star Democrat, and both have been showing their age.

“A lot of readers felt like they were getting a rehash of what’s in the Star Democrat,” said Larry Effingham, vice president and publisher of all three. “We wanted to do some repackaging, but the (weekly) papers looked so similar we couldn’t overcome that perception.”

Looking for guidance, Effingham called the American Press Institute, which put him in touch with designer and newsroom-management consultant Phil Nesbitt, a former associate director of API and past president of the international Society of News Design.

Redesigning a weekly can be tricky. Much of the deeply local content that connects with readers — huge calendars, announcements, club news and check-passing photos — can be downright ugly if not handled well, and some publishers are loath to change what has been working for decades. “I don’t think a lot of community newspapers showcase material as well as they should,’ Nesbitt said. “We set out to provide a number of different avenues to do that.”

Nesbitt quickly sized up the problems at the Record Observer and the Times-Record. “They were pretty good-looking papers for the Fifties,” he said. “The papers were a jumble, with not a great deal of organization. The presentation was very gray, and it was difficult to quickly find what you were looking for.”

In addition, both had a heavy, almost intimidating tone, Nesbitt said, and correcting that “was one of the major directions this design took.”

As a first step, he said, “I spent time in the market area looking at how people read, what they read, talking to them about what’s important to them. I don’t think you can do a quality redesign from a presentation or a content standpoint without understanding who the customer is.”

What he found was a deep desire for news that conveyed a sense of community, but also a growing number of newcomers “who are not quite as aware of community at this point.” For these readers, many of them in fast-growing Queen Anne’s County, useful news about such topics as traffic congestion would play a key role.

Armed with an idea of who was reading the papers, Nesbitt began working on a series of prototypes. In keeping with a desire for consistency, “more from a systems and production angle than anything else,” Nesbitt said many major elements were standardized.

He switched both from a six-column news grid to five, and both got Century Old Style as their body type. For ease of reading, he bumped the body type from 8 to 9.5 points and the leading from 9 to 10.5. Gutters were expanded to 18 points from 12, “which creates a different tone — lifts it and lightens it. The overall effect for page one is much more open.”

The biggest difference was in the design of the flags. “Both changed dramatically, and that made for a big change in the complexion of the papers,” Nesbitt said.

The Times-Record went with a horizontal design using Walbaum Book Bold — “which has some feeling of Bodoni, but the thin stokes are thicker,” he said. The Record Observer used a stacked flag — “Record” sitting atop “Observer” — featuring Century Old Style Bold, with a green bar underneath that reverses out “Queen Anne’s County.” Each flag allows the use of an overline to tease important inside stories.

The intent, said Nesbitt, was to give the front page a stronger, cleaner look. In the case of the Times-Record, the redesign eliminated material from the top of the page; at the Record Observer, more information was added — on the left, the index, bar code, volume and price, and on the right a new feature called “Traffic Watch” that gives a quick look at upcoming highway work. “That was a quick and easy way to give readers something they could tear out and put on the fridge,” Nesbitt said.

A different headline font was used for each paper because Nesbitt didn’t want them to look too similar. “The difference in the head fonts brings a distinctive look to both,” he said.

The Record Observer used Berkeley in four weights, and the Times-Record used Slimbach, also in four weights. “Both editors had a lot of input, and the editor at the Times-Record liked a slightly heavier feel,” said Nesbitt. “Berkeley is lighter and more elegant, and it’s directed more toward the transplants. The Slimbach is heavier and more condensed, with unique character shapes, and it’s a good foil to Walbaum.”

Each paper got a 114-point-deep panel across the bottom of the front. The Times-Record uses it for the bar code, index, and Traffic Watch, as well as a seven-day forecast and a promo for each week’s American Profile insert. The Record Observer’s is given over to the forecast, the American Profile promo, and teases to other inside material.

An important part of each paper’s design is that news features have been given a home on the front page, complete with an overline label and a Franklin Gothic Book headline. With the old design, Nesbitt said, news features often were just part of the mix and had little to distinguish them. This way, he said, “you let people know the story is different.”

Inside, calendars and events-oriented material have been reorganized with better typography that makes a clearer distinction between each day’s information. The body type is still Century Old Style, but dates are in Franklin Gothic and the days are delineated by a triangle bug. This material, said Nesbitt, “used to be heavy and run-on, and now it’s a lot easier to read.” In the Record Observer’s design, a full page of calendar information is punctuated with a rail on the left that displays contact information for local officials.

Also simplifying the look was a switch to “keyword” jump heads instead of full headlines.

To drive the new style home, Nesbitt created a 40-page booklet of style sheets showing each device, what it does, and how it is constructed.

The redesigns debuted in early April, and publisher Effingham says the response has been gratifying. “The first week we got lots of positive comments,” he said. “What we heard was, ‘I like the fresh new look.’”

Since the average reader is 53, the papers’ larger and clearer type style is likely to pay dividends. But there’s another benefit, Effingham notes. Increasing the leading and type size took space from the news hole, he said, making it all the more important to write and edit tightly — worthwhile goals at any paper.

And the redesign also had the effect of jazzing the staff. “The sense of professionalism took a step forward. It’s a brand new product,” he said. “The editors and reporters are excited. Now the other papers are asking, ‘Gee, when do we get to do it?’”

Nesbitt said there’s a lesson for other weeklies in what Chesapeake Publishing has done. “Weekly newspapers in this country should pay far more attention to design and presentation because a growing number of people are more concerned with their communities, and their major source of information is still the community newspaper,” he said. “There is no reason to make a reader struggle to get information because they’re eventually going to give up.”

Curt Hazlett is a seminar associate with the American Press Institute. A former managing editor of the Portland (Maine) Press Herald and Maine Sunday Telegram, he has worked as an editor at the Washington Post and the Chicago Sun-Times and as a business reporter in the Chicago bureau of Reuters.