THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1997, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, February 23, 1997 TAG: 9702240008
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J5 EDITION: FINAL
COLUMN: REPORT TO READERS
SOURCE: Lynn Feigenbaum
LENGTH: 99 lines
Phase 1 of ``the new Pilot'' debuted Monday but the changes had been months - actually, years - in the planning. Still, I hadn't planned ahead. Was it too late to book a cruise to the Caribbean?
Nah, I wouldn't do that, even knowing there would be a deluge of calls all week. Even knowing that readers take to change like a duck to the desert.
We were, in fact, deluged with calls - nearly 400 to a three-day phone bank set up in the newsroom and staffed by editors, reporters and other Pilot employees. And dozens more calls, faxes and letters to the public editor's office.
There was no simple consensus. Comments ranged from, ``It looks like a big-city newspaper now'' and ``absolutely fabulous'' to ``I need time to get used to it'' and the dreaded, ``It wasn't broke, why did you mess with it?''
Among the big hits with readers were:
The daily ``1-minute news'' roundup on Page A2. (Asked one: Why didn't you put it on the front page?)
Monday's Your Business section, though a few readers said they'd miss the tabloid-sized Business Weekly.
The newly organized and expanded stock listings. ``I thought I was reading The Wall Street Journal,'' said one man. Others were equally enthusiastic.
Increased health and medical features in The Daily Break.
What readers grumbled about were:
Moving the weather page from the back of MetroNews to the business section.
Readability - the type is too small and light, difficult to read, they said. More about that later.
And initial glitches that seem inevitable when there's change - like making obituary names too small, dropping a slew of cities off the weather page and leaving out gold prices and Today's Chuckle. All were fixed by the next day.
Inevitably, readers saw change where there wasn't any - at least, not planned. Some callers complained early in the week that the revision brought ``too many ads'' to the news sections - but the ads were the result of Presidents Day sales.
There were sighs of relief - ``at least you didn't mess with my puzzle.'' And suggestions for otherwise improving the paper: Redo the TV green sheet, porch the paper, cover outlying towns, give us more sports.
And some changes were barely mentioned by callers, like the expanded primetime TV grid in The Daily Break and the daily in-depth Focus story on A5.
Most puzzling, intially, were complaints about the type size being too small to read. The body type of stories didn't change a jot, and the print on the stock pages is, while still tiny, bigger and airier than it was. But readers sensed a change, and they were right.
As design director Eric Seidman explains, large-sized quote pullouts and captions are slightly smaller; the horizontal rules between stories are thinner, and heavy black bars over stories were discarded. Column sigs - the photos of columnists - were also made smaller and finer. ``It looks like you're all rising from the mists,'' laughed one caller.
Put all those tweaks together, said Seidman, and the inside news pages have a lighter look. It was planned that way.
``The new pages are calmer, less bold and more organized,'' said Nelson Brown, deputy managing editor for design and presentation.
``There is more order to the pages,'' he added, ``more of a sense of organization (we hope) and perhaps, a little more sophistication - although that is in the eye of the beholder!''
But even though these print changes are relatively minor, they do require an adjustment for regular readers. We're all creatures of habit, and a new look is always jarring.
My suggestion: Give it a couple of weeks and then see what you think. Chances are we'll all forget what the newspaper looked like before the change.
And, once the dust settles, I'd be particularly interested in hearing what readers have to say about content changes. Is The Pilot giving you the local, national and international news you're looking for? Enough personal finance and health advice? Is the new Best Bets calendar a help for planning your day?
And that's not all. Tomorrow is the debut of the new Pilot-WVEC venture, LNC (Local News on Cable). A TV anchor desk complete with lights and logos has been built right into the newsroom and reporters and editors are learning to powder their noses, as they make the leap from print journalism to the TV screen.
Then there's Phase 2 of ``the new Pilot,'' beginning Monday, March 3, including an expanded Hampton Roads section (in place of Metro-News). Also, the opinion pages will move out of the A section.
Lots of change. Guess I can still book that imagined cruise to the Caribbean. . . .
AN ELEPHANT-SIZED DILEMMA. Two frustrated moms who tried to take their children to the circus walk gave us a big scold.
They had read on Monday's Daily Break front that the parade of elephants, etc., would begin between 7 and 8 p.m. It didn't - the walk was held hours earlier. The newspaper learned about the change but too late to redo the preprinted Break.
A clarification notice was on Page A2, but not everyone saw it.
One mom said she and her 2-year-old, along with many others, were out in 30-degree weather ``waiting for the circus to come by and it never did. . . . I'm really disappointed, as is my little boy.''
Seems to me that this problem has come up before. The Daily Break should have left out specific times and, like the A2 notice, given an INFOLINE phone number for updated information.
Let's remember that next year.
MEMO: Call the public editor at 446-2475, or send a computer message to
lynn(AT)infi.net