Pekin (Ill.) Daily Times gives morning delivery a whole new look

Making changes to the content and design of the paper is challenging. Not only did this staff take on the redesign, but they did so with a big change to their work schedule with aplomb. Before the shift to morning delivery, many newsroom staffers start their day before the sun rises. The new nightly deadlines call for afternoon shifts for many.

Many logistical issues were handled behind the scenes that included sending pages to production at Pekin's sibling paper the Journal Star in Peoria.

Publisher Gregg Ratliff and editor Michelle Teheux (tuh-HOO) kept things moving ahead nicely. Michelle answered a few questions about the redesign process. 

What prompted the decision to redesign the Pekin Daily Times?

We had not had a major redesign in close to 20 years, and I felt we looked very dated. Also, I felt some of our content organization needed to be re-thought. And like everyone, we're being asked to do more with less, and we wanted to start incorporating some ASFs into our pages. Those have a very contemporary look and didn't really fit in well with the look we had. When I became editor a year ago, I knew I wanted to pursue a redesign as soon as I could manage it.

What were some of the challenges involved? 

A unique challenge we had was that we planned to convert from an afternoon to a morning paper at the same time, and during much of this process we were without a city editor. So just getting the paper out every day was a little more challenging than usual. Adding in the extensive planning time needed to turn all our routines upside down and to establish new plans for obtaining new forms of content made it fairly challenging. We did become a morning paper on the same day we launched the redesign, so it was a lot of change all at once. To top it off, a long-time paginator retired on the day we completed the last issue of the old design, and one of the remaining two full-time paginators became extremely ill the night we began our new production schedule/redesign. More routine challenges included the usual fear that long-time subscribers might react negatively to the new design. So far, most comments have been very positive.

What can you tell us about some of the new content?

The front page is probably the biggest and certainly the most obvious change. It's much fresher. We now have a daily as opposed to weekly business page, utilizing an ASF to anchor the page several days a week. We have many more spaces for reader-supplied content. And we do much more cross-referencing -- lots of referring from one thing on one page to something related on another page.

How have readers and advertisers responded to the changes?

It's still early, but so far I've heard almost 100 percent positive feedback. I'll let Gregg address the advertiser's question.

If you had to do it again, what would you do differently?

I would have worked more with the sports staff and brought them on board a little more than I did.

Joe Greco is corporate design director for GateHouse Media.
Send questions, comments and ideas for blog topics to jgreco@gatehousemedia.com.