The last of the Old Gray Ladies is gone. Her departure was a bit of a shock, but there’s been surprisingly little mourning.
The new Wall Street Journal showed up on April 9, sporting color graphics, pastel tint boxes, and trendy section-front promos with little silhouetted photos. The new Journal is dressed to attract readers younger than the current average age of 50 - and the upscalex advertisers who love them.
The goal, said publisher Peter R. Kann, was to make the paper “somewhat more approachable, more appealing.” The project included a $232 million press overhaul to dramatically increase color capacity. The new Journal was hyped and feared for weeks before it launched. Yet, as was true when those other icons, The New York Times and The Washington Post, redesigned and added color, there’s been little in the way of an obituary for the old paper.
We’re at an interesting place in newspaper history - where innovations breed anxiety and suspicion but then are quickly accepted with no apparent regrets. It’s a place communications scholars say we’ve been many times before. But now, even as the old models haunt us, changes to mass media forms come thick and fast and media consumers adapt.
The New York Times says the old Journal wore “its conservative appearance like a stiff white collar for a century.” (Look who’s talking.) Its Victorian typography and ruthless underplaying of stories (even the best got only a one-column headline) were part of the paper’s grand mystique. The old Journal was a throwback - a revered one.
So it’s remarkable that the overthrow of the throwback went so well. Dow Jones conducted an Internet poll of Journal subscribers a few days after the launch. An amazing 87 percent approved of the changes. The company plans a thorough study of who’s reading in a few months; initial indications among target younger readers are positive.
Why has the transition been so easy? For one thing, the new look is not the least bit jarring. One media reporter called it “totally consistent with the old, but jauntier and friendlier. This wasn’t a new Journal; it was the old inner Journal revealed.” It’s as if the paper spent a few months at a spa, being massaged out of its inhibitions, and, while it looks like itself, it’s fitter, more vibrant, more in tune with the times. It’s the same serious person in slightly sleeker clothes.
Indeed, the redesign, led by Mario Garcia of Garcia Media (and a Poynter affiliate), was an exercise in restraint. Classic Journal ornaments, such as diamond rules and headline hoods, were tweaked. The quirky bulges of the exclusive Scotch headline typeface were refined. Almost imperceptibly, spacing was opened up between stories.
And, in a particular triumph of substance over style, a new typeface, HTF Retina, was designed for the stock listings, which took a year to redesign. Says noted designer Alexander Isley: “The result is not a flashy, attention-getting trick, but a solution that is smarter, more efficient, more legible, and that serves a needed purpose. It is the definition of good design.”
Clearly, the redesign was done with great care. Still, why risk it? The old Journal, second only to USA TODAY in circulation, was considered the pinnacle of journalism by many. It had avoided a redesign for 60 years. (Some would say more than a century, since all that changed in 1942 was the front-page grid.) Why risk the possibility that color and design could sully the Old Lady’s reputation and undermine her authority?
Actually the Journal had good reasons to change - commercial reasons. Circulation has been flat the last few years. In 2001, ad revenues were at their lowest level in four years. Ad linage dropped 27 percent between February 2001 and February 2002. The paper has been harder hit by the recession than most.
To make a play for new readers, the Journal had to overcome the traditional journalism suspicion that design and color can somehow compromise the news. In the days leading up to the launch, speculation about the redesign was loaded with anxiety. On MetaFilter.Com, the politics and culture weblog, there was apprehension about “Color on the front page - Nooooo!” And “so much white space, maybe the WSJ decided to go for a lower information-to-page-space ratio. Sad.” And about making all the changes at once: “Unveiling a new design for a newspaper that has looked the same since 1944 is just so wrong.”
After the launch, though, there was little criticism. Most agreed with Canadian paper National Post that the new design “not only maintains but heightens the essential elegance of the Journal.”
What few critics there were made almost moral judgments. John Powers of the LA Weekly lamented: “I’m sorry to see the Journal chasing after popularity with lip gloss. It has long been America’s most rigorously designed (and best written) daily, and this less stern version feels paradoxically less seductive - like swapping your favorite dominatrix for the girl next door.” Many of us hate to think of our cultural icons “chasing after popularity.” We want them to have the courage of their black-and-white convictions. We don’t like to see them worrying about market share, caring what others think, calculating their effect, fussing in front of the mirror. The dowdier they look, the more independent and reliable we imagine they are.
Further, there is the cachet of publications so removed from the popular aesthetic, so reader-unfriendly, that they have to be studied to be read. One Science News subscriber bemoaned the recent redesign of that magazine: “It used to be really dry-looking, like an academic journal, which was kind of cool because you have that around your house and people would think you’re smart.”
And maybe we’re just uncomfortable with the idea of change in the communication forms that shape our culture. In his book “The Rise of the Image, The Fall of the Word,”Mitchell Stephens documents many developments that were originally denounced as infantile, mind-numbing, “pretty,” or immoral - opera, theater, the telephone, and printed books among them. In fact, Stephens writes, “Most of the inventions, techniques, or art forms we now hold dear were once dismissed as useless or even evil.”
Nobody is dismissing the new Journal. Nostalgia for the old Journal was brief. Perhaps just as Old Gray Ladies are dying off, so may be those who equate them with Truth and Justice. Those coveted young readers grew up with color television and the Internet; they may not appreciate the austere beauty of cramped, unadorned black-and-white pages. “Now, even the most intellectual elite like some eye popcorn,” says Mario Garcia.
The redesign of The Wall Street Journal is both subtle and powerful. In the world of newspaper design, it is historic. In anybody’s timeline graphic, the Journal remake would show up alongside the move to cold type, the founding of the Society for News Design, the launch of USA TODAY, the development of the page layout program QuarkXpress, pagination, and the conversion of thousands of U.S. papers to the 50-inch web.
It’s big.
The new Journal is important, not as a transformation, but as a marker. Newspapers have never been immune to market forces, even if they looked like they were for a time. Perhaps newspapers are letting go of the pretenses and trappings of the past. That doesn’t have to be a bad thing.
