The previews I’ve seen of the Tribune and the way you’ve given readers a preview of what’s to come are impressive. The video seems to bring readers into the conversation. What are you most excited about, personally?
Jonathon Berlin, Chicago Tribune design director: The most exciting thing about the changes we’ll start on Monday is that it will really be a completely different experience.
All of the best things we do — the analysis, the voices, the way we talk to our readers — are going to be amplified and turned up. I think what we’ve managed to do is take the way that you’re used to reading a big-city broadsheet daily and just sort of turn it on its ear and make it into a daily magazine about Chicago.
Page two and three of the front section, an opening spread of pages that we call The Talk, will have our top columnists.
It also has a page that’s full of the things that people are talking about — the types of things that journalists talk about throughout the day, at news meetings. For some reason, these things never seem to make it into the paper, because we fill the paper by a different set of rules than what’s interesting and human!
What have you learned from readers in this process?
Berlin: What we found through our research and talking with readers is that people respected who we were. They knew the Tribune and they liked the Tribune, but the emotional engagement was something that we really needed to work on.
We have a great reach throughout Chicago through our paper and our Web site. But what we didn’t have was a very deep, emotional resonance.
So we’re going to try to make it clear that we’ve got, in the building, 600 experts on Chicago baseball and transit and government or whatever. And those people are going to be talking right to readers. And there are a bunch of features that will work like that.
So, what I’m really excited about is that we’re going to launch at a time when we get to do great journalism. We’ve got one baseball team in the playoffs. And then, we’ve got this great presidential race with a Chicago guy, right at the front of the pack!
Those stories could hardly be better opportunities for using a variety of story forms.
Berlin: Those types of stories make the newspaper come alive.
Those kinds of stories are really going to let us know how the design works. With baseball playoffs and with a presidential election, you do every kind of storytelling that’s possible in a newspaper.
If Obama gets elected, then that is a fabulous story for us. It would be our guy in the White House.
You’ve done a lot of work to explain the redesign with your online guide. That must have taken an incredible amount of energy to put together — on top of re-crafting the paper itself. How has the guide helped you?
Berlin: We put the guide online and we sent out an e-mail to two hundred and some thousand readers — sort of our most devoted readers. We said, “Hey, check this out and tell us what you think.” We’ve gotten back around a thousand comments, I think.
It ran the gamut — a lot of positive stuff; a lot of good questions that helped us to calibrate where we are.
By discussing the changes online, it seems that you’re trying to bring them into the process. What other things are you planning?
Berlin: We’re really looking at this as the start of something. Monday is our first one, so there is some significance to that. But what this really represents is the start of a new era for the Tribune. We’re not going to be afraid to change things. We’re not going to be afraid to adjust to what our readers tell us. We’re going to keep developing and pushing.
A newspaper in 2008 needs to be able to change frequently. We’re going to try to listen hard to readers.
What else have readers told you?
Berlin: They’ve told us a lot. They want local news. They want a watchdog. They want us to help them out with things to do.
What are some specific things you’ve worked in to the new design?
Berlin: They’ve told us for decades that they wanted fewer jumps. And this time, we’re actually going to give that to them. Our 1A will have fewer story starts. And inside the main news sections, we’re not going to jump. We’ll probably cut down our jumping by at least half. It will only be on the most important stories that deserve that kind of length.
Will you continue to promote conversation with editors?
Berlin: Yes. We have a blog that will answer questions. We’re going to make a big push to respond to every question.
Our new editor, Gerry Kern, helped to develop some of the metrics that the Tribune Company uses to study what people think of the paper. So, he’s really tuned in to taking what readers say and figuring out how to turn that into editorial decisions.
What do you see down the road?
Berlin: These are hard times, but you’ve got to meet them head-on.
Three to five years down the line, I think we’re going to look back at what the Tribune Company guys have done — the Zell guys — and say “Wow.” They’re aggressively taking on a pretty dismal situation.
Once you get past the chatter about “Orlando this” and “Baltimore that,” I think you’re going to be looking at a company that is trying to be as smart as possible in the face of some very challenging circumstances. And making change happen in an industry that, traditionally, doesn’t like change.
