Honolulu business newspaper unveils redesign

Kevin Bumgarner, the editor of Pacific Business News, writes about the redesign of the American City Business Journals paper.

Bumgarner writes, “Here’s how we framed the challenge: How can we take a suite of products that already have some of the highest levels of executive readership of any market in our company and make them even more relevant, more convenient, more useful for you?

“The challenge sounded simple enough. Yet, in a news cycle that never stops and with a million things demanding your attention, we know how difficult it can be to cut through the clutter. We also envisioned how easy it could become for us to get lost in debating the merits of one storytelling platform over another and lose sight of the actual story. And we vowed not to let that happen, because without great stories and agenda-setting content, every new approach is just empty calories — things that take your time but never satisfy.

“One of the first things we did was implement a digital-first news reporting concept, deciding that we would never again hold a breaking news story for Friday’s print edition. Our research, company focus groups and your engagement with our website and email products told us you wanted a steady flow of breaking news every day, and breaking news was not the primary reason you subscribed to our print edition. We also dramatically increased the number of photos and graphics with our digital content, and added a queue for local and national videos on our homepage.”

Read more here.