Paper is compact but reaction has been huge
Opinion
Others lamented the back-page crossword puzzle moving to page 2. The weather map was liked by many but not by others.
Other common denominators included querying the absence of local sport, the front page weather strip and Capital Chatter.
On the plus side, many complimented the increased opinion and analysis pages, bigger, meatier news reads, and the new package as a whole.
In short, not a single bit of the new paper was left untouched – in compliments and criticism.
Change is hard, I realise that, so we are collating each and every bit of feedback, and will analyse it properly to see where and how we can make improvements.
There will be some changes, no doubt, but some aspects will stay as they are now. The decisions weren’t taken lightly.
In mulling the format and changes over the past 12 months, we invested huge resources in subscriber focus groups and experts in their field to help us decide on the new design, page flow, elements to retain or discard – and from that came the compact.
Here’s a short lie of the land:
❚ The compact will remain one section, but we will continue to study page flows and positioning.
❚ Local sport coverage was cut because, despite its huge popularity on the sidelines, it attracted extremely low readership, in print and online. Those resources have been diverted to sports coverage read by tens of thousands.
❚ The weather map is already being improved.
❚ It was a choice between Capital Chatter and Pet Of The Day. Paws beat the people on weekdays but you’ll find a bumper file of tweets on Saturday’s page.
❚ I hear you on the page 2 crossword. It simply can’t go on the back page anymore.
In replying individually to just about every email and text (473 at the last count), I quoted poet John Lydgate’s famous line that – as much as we’d love to, by the way – ‘‘you can’t please all of the people all of the time’’. That was the case with the broadsheet format – and will be the case now.
I sincerely hope our goal of bringing you better, bolder content – across the board – will make up for some of the new inconveniences.
Eric Janssen, Wellington editor