What’s behind the ACBJ paper redesigns

Joanna Sullivan, the editor in chief of the Baltimore Business Journal, writes about the redesign of her paper and the others in the American City Business Journals chain.

Sullivan writes, “This week we’re debuting our resized print edition with an updated look for familiar features including our news pages, reporter pages and our public records section. The new presentation from our award-winning designers is meant to reflect the way readers like you consume news.

“The redesign will be rolled out across all 40 papers owned by the BBJ’s parent company American City Business Journals and aims to showcase modern storytelling with a more clean, authoritative and cohesive set of styles and templates. Our goal is not only to enhance our visuals but to make our operations more efficient so we can focus on quality storytelling across platforms.

“Let’s walk through the highlights:

“A refreshed look and feel: While there have been modest changes along the way, this is our first major redesign in a decade, and our designers have worked hard to create templates that emphasize modular design, readability and consistency across our publications nationwide.

“A new paper size: The size of our print edition is smaller, driven by a goal to become uniform across all ACBJ publications nationally. This is a tremendous benefit for our advertisers, as they’ll be able to format ads once, for a single dimension, to serve various markets.

“The change also benefits subscribers. Consolidation in the printing industry has reduced the number of enterprises that print newspapers, so the shift to a uniform size gives our company a better selection of printers and preserves our ability to continue to produce physical copies. Advertisers and readers alike will also appreciate our move to a brighter white paper stock, enhancing readability.”