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Football season is over but the DP have apparently punted on their revamped column-body font, dumping the new serif-heavy, smaller font and bringing back their old reliable. Curiously, they are still using the new font for subheadlines.
The new font lasted only 5 days - the January 6 edition uses the old font.
With or without the reversion, the conversion was hardly 'seamless to the eye' as editor Geri Ferrara claimed. It was, in fact, quite jarring and bringing back the old font is unassailable evidence that readers, employees or both decided the new font was unacceptable.
While I applaud the move it's a rather quick and humiliating climbdown considering all the breathless hype trotted out by DP editors & management less than one week ago.
The DP has joined the huge number of dailies in trimming itself down from traditional broadsheet width to a more narrow format.
Nothing new under the sun of course but newspaper hacks cannot resist the urge to imply that this somehow qualifies them for collective sainthood. Cue the greenie litany: less ink, less newsprint and soy-based ink (yummy)!
This new skinny paper is a wonderful thing. How do we know? Because the people at the paper say so dammit! Editor Geri Ferrara and her lieutenants may have fewer columns to work with but that still gives them plenty of room to gush: dedication to local news, increased ad value (read: they will charge more for less), streamlined (presumably for the car-based carriers who must toss each copy), reader friendly. Yes, reader friendly - this paper now purrs like a cat when you open it up! No more paper cuts or stains on hands! In fact it may have curative properties but the FDA has not evaluated such a claim.
Back to reality...the decreasing size of newspapers mirrors perfectly the decline in the role they play in news coverage and in the (abusive) position they have played in influencing public opinion. Even papers 'leaning right' typically support every and any government boondoggle and expenditure. One-horse towns buying property, police cruisers, computers and other things they don't understand let alone use is just ducky with the DP. With six columns or five you can be sure the DP will never call for an accounting of all those dollars flowing into the system but never flowing back out.
As for the physical look of the paper the other big change is the standard typeface used. Inexplicably the DP has bucked the Internet-inspired trend of clean, neat fonts that aid legibility even if they lack a certain artistry. Instead, they have gone with a serif-heavy font (i.e., lots of little lines, wings and so forth on the letters) and a surfeit of mysterious, inconsistent spaces between words and letters that harkens back to the age of manual typesetting when type had to be 'slugged' in order to create clean column edges. A charitable description might be text produced using an early version of PageMaker for the original Macintosh computer. It now looks like text in a high school paper.
I haven't yet mustered the energy to compare individual news items from the old and new DP to see if this brave new version is actually an excuse to also cut down on article length but obviously fewer columns mean less real estate on offer for all stories.
