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The new Wall Street Journal debuted today with a “slimmer size” — its page width reduced by 20 percent — accompanied, said E&P, by “more dramatic changes in what sounds like a nod to USA Today: shorter stories, bullet points, and infographics. Purists will be agog when the paper of record for CEOs borrows from the paper of record on the Delta shuttle.”
“Journal 3.0″ includes “new features and new ways to find and consume the news,” Publisher L. Gordon Crovitz tells readers, innovations “meant to establish the Journal as the first newspaper rethought for how readers increasingly now get their news, often in real time, from many sources, all day long.” Importantly, the paper will “now aim to make 80 percent of your Journal what-it-means journalism, devoting the other 20 percent to ensuring that you haven’t missed anything of importance from the previous day” — a sensible turn toward analysis, though we can’t help but note that today’s smaller front page, with a sizable ad and two of its five columns taken up by “What’s News,” has room for only three stories.
While Crovitz told E&P that he’s “girded for the letters of complaints written with quills on parchment” from staid Journal readers, cool and quill-free bloggers greeted the redesign this morning with decidedly mixed — and restrained — reviews.
Getting past the slimmed-down New Year’s jokes (“Looks like the Wall Street Journal‘s New Year’s resolution is to get skinnier too,” Lifehacker notes, “and they’re showing off their new bod for free today”), Fraters Libertas writes that while the smaller WSJ “is easier to read,” “some of the new colors and graphics are a little too close to USA Today fluff for my tastes.”
“The Journal has always had a distinct and serious look that projected gravitas. If you saw someone in public reading the WSJ, you automatically granted them a certain amount of respect,” Fraters Libertas says. “I’m not sure if the new design still carries the same intellectual heft.”
“If you picked up your Journal this morning, you probably noticed that it’s shrunk. Even the fonts seem different. I was appalled,” writes subscriber Rebecca Ryan of Madison, Wisconsin. “The Journal is a bastion of tradition and a cornerstone in my life: no matter what city I’m in, I can get a copy of it. It makes me feel safe.”
But as Ryan dove in, “intent to understand how this shrinky-dink paper came to be,” she liked what she found: “Only after I experienced the paper — after I read articles, found my favorite columnists, noticed the enhancements that I liked and read Crovitz’s rationale — was I comforted to know that only the format had changed.”
‘What’ the Journal delivers (“solid, smart reporting”) “has not changed,” Ryan concludes. “But ‘how’ they deliver it is transforming to reach their market in more contemporary ways.”
Marilynn Mobley of Remain Relevant in Changing Times is even more effusive, writing that the “trimmed down” Journal “has shed the fat, built up its news analysis muscle and will probably gain nothing but a more loyal readership as a result”:
I was immediately struck by how much easier it is to read now, solely because of the change in navigation. Summary boxes, increased use of color, photos and a generally less cluttered look wowed me.
Best of all, the new design integrates beautifully with the WSJ‘s Web site. Let’s face it: the Internet and broadcast news outlets keep us up to date on the news. People read the WSJ not to learn what’s happening, but why and how.
More bracingly, Jonathan Berr at Blogging Stocks declares that “Dow Jones has heard the clarion call of the Internet and responded with a sweeping redesign of the Wall Street Journal, about three years too late. Despite all of the talk in the Reader’s Guide in today’s paper about ‘excellence’ and meeting the expectations of today’s busy reader, the reasons for the changes have more to do with the shift of advertising to the Internet and a desire to cut down on newsprint costs.”
But it’s not too late — and the Journal‘s embrace of such sweeping change in these tumultuous times is both admirable and necessary. The big, traditional, comforting Journal may be gone, but as long as the paper’s leaders continue to remember “that what matters most is the journalism,” and the deep corps of reporters producing it, the Journal will have a solid future.
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