By KAREN PETERSON
Senior Editor, The (Tacoma Wash.) News Tribune

Why would you change our News Tribune? We like it just the way it is.

That's what we heard from the first focus group we pulled together last year to talk about our impending redesign.

We are fortunate that residents of greater Tacoma generally like their hometown newspaper. In fact, our daily circulation has grown each of the past five years.

So the feedback made us stop and think. For a minute.

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At the same meeting, readers apologized for not being able to read the paper thoroughly each day. They felt guilty about what had become a growing recycling pile.

They wanted us to remain our hometown selves, but they needed us to be a quicker and easier read.

If we accomplished nothing else with this redesign, we were determined to find more readable body type. Two years earlier, we had switched to a font designed for its efficiency on the 50-inch web. Readers told us from the beginning it was too small and too fine, and even asked if we were using gray ink. They said it was hard to read and they were right.

Our design consultant this time, Kristen Powell, showed us a dozen type faces, assuring us any of them would be better than what we had. We narrowed the field, tested pages of them on our presses and settled on Concorde, a rich, round face with a hearty feel.

We knew that if readers liked nothing else about the redesign, they'd find our stories easier to read. We marketed that hard.

Before moving to the next step, Powell challenged us to define the personality we wanted to project with the redesign.

We cover a community often described as "gritty" by outside media, and residents here are proud of that. Tacoma's past is one of railroads and timber; its present is shaped by its seaport and military posts. Its future is unfolding in the form of a downtown renaissance.

As a regional second city, Tacoma wears the spunky underdog role well. We're not Seattle, and we don't want to be.

To answer Powell's question, we chose six words we most wanted associated with the new News Tribune: local, spirited, friendly, compelling, smart and leader.

From there, we selected headline type, settling on a combination of fonts we thought reflected Tacoma and the South Puget Sound region.

Executive editor David Zeeck described them this way in a column to readers: "Parkinson (invented for use in Rolling Stone magazine a generation ago) recalls our frontier, industrial past. Whitman is straightforward and direct, kind of like the people we serve. Agenda is sophisticated and bold, calling to mind the new look and future-oriented mission of our museums and universities."

The most radical change in our new design, both for readers and our staff, was the addition of summary sentences. Patterned after those in the Miami Herald, these bold-face nut graphs are three to five lines long and sit atop the first leg of type. They are not a subhead designed to tease readers into a story. Rather, they give readers the basic facts in case they don't have time to read an entire narrative.

Every story longer than eight inches, except for columns, gets a summary sentence. Our reporters write them, which we believe also helps them to focus stories. Copy editors edit them so they don't repeat the headline or lead.

During our launch, we told readers that summary sentences would allow them to scan the paper in 15 to 20 minutes and still leave for the day feeling informed.

In addition to the summary sentences, we added kickers above each headline to help guide readers through the paper. Sometimes they are labels, "Election 2004," and sometimes they amplify the content of a story, "Contract dispute stalls work."

Our new design also highlights the lead story on each page. We believe we can help readers by sorting through stories and tipping them to the biggest news. Lead headlines are in Agenda, a bold sans serif font, while every other headline on a page is in the finer Whitman serif font. We identify lead stories even on inside wire pages, something we didn't do before.

We also reinserted vertical rules between stories — the same rules we took out two years before. Readers say the rules give us a more organized look.

Our redesign also highlights content improvements we've been working on for the past year.

Increasingly, we ask writers, editors and page designers to break out scanable information into glance boxes, what-next boxes and how-to-get-involved boxes. As part of our redesign, we put them in retro-looking color screened boxes. The colors are soft and reflective of the nature around us — Tacoma Blue and Tacoma Tan. Readers tell us the colors draw their eye to the bulleted information that makes us easier to digest.

We also have experimented over the past year with alternative story forms. For information that can be presented in bulleted form, we try not to waste a reader's time with a narrative format.

When our local light rail line reported annual ridership numbers, we published a series of bullets that held to the page. To explain the pros and cons of a proposed tax measure, we ran a scanable half page of facts and mathematical formulas in place of a story. We even developed a full-page checklist for holding the City of Tacoma accountable for reform promises made after a police department scandal.

Our redesign assigned a special all-caps headline type to alternative story forms. It's distinctive from our other headlines, so over time are readers are learning that it signals something different.

After considering a redesign of our flag, we kept the Mount Rainier backdrop that has come to be our brand (the marketing department was relieved). We switched to an almost identical, but slightly bolder flag font. The change was imperceptible to most readers, but the new font has a greater presence in newsstands.

We kept navigational devices rolled out in our last redesign and based on Readership Institute research. They include an A2 digest and color next-day teasers on the back of the A section.

We also kept our section-front floorboards, scanable rails across the bottom of the Sports, Features and Business covers. Each floorboard is divided into three or four sections, each containing a cool Web site, an insightful quote, box scores, and even the Dilbert comic strip on the Business front.

We also added new content to each section as we rolled it out — a gift to readers we were asking to adjust to a new look. We beefed up people news in the A section, added comics to the features section, and made our weather map bigger and more local.

After a year of planning and months of marketing, we launched our redesign in October. Surprisingly, few readers rebelled against the new look. In fact, they found the summary sentences and screened breakout boxes particularly helpful in getting through the paper on busy mornings.

Best of all, they said they still recognized the News Tribune the morning after launch. And many found an old friend even a little friendlier.