What have they done with the old TP?

Editor's Notes

Today’s changes are not so shocking to make you spill your coffee, but by now you’ve probably noticed something different from the last paper you picked up on your doorstep. We’ve gone back to the past with a new Tracy Press flag on the front page — actually the old one that nearly matches the 1970s sign on our building on A Street and the 1940s lettering on the brick wall in our alley.

Today’s Old English flag is red, and it’s larger than the black Tracy Press flag from more than a year ago. It’s also has some three-dimensional design work, circa 2005.

We’re inspired by Rolling Stone magazine and also by the comments of readers, who told us they just never got used to the square TP flag after a year. We still like it, but we’ll relegate the red TP to our business cards.

Probably bigger than the flag change, though, is our radical change with the sports pages. Unlike what your first thought may have been, if you’ve gotten that far — that we had a problem in the press room and accidentally turned some pages upside down — we actually planned to run the entire sports section this way, beginning on the back page. And we aim to keep doing it.

The idea came from a brainstorming session several months ago here at 10th and A streets. Readers asked us if we could be more consistent about the location of the sports pages. We talked about starting the sports section on the back, like the Chicago Sun-Times, but when we studied a week’s worth of that paper, we thought it just didn’t seem natural to read the pages from right to left.

Then someone suggested we turn the paper upside down so we could read from left to right. Some of the editors in the room, myself included, guffawed at the out-of-the-box thinking. The publisher would never go for it. We couldn’t possibly pull it off. Our old offset press would probably sputter to a stop if we tried it.

But he did (go for it), we did (pull it off) and it didn’t (roll to a stop). We ran some test runs with some sports pages flipped — flip for sports — and with some sports pages not flipped, and we showed them to all the readers we could find who would look at our work and give us their opinions.

Most people liked the upside-down model, even if the page numbers did run backward, which made more sense than to renumber them. Typically, when they took their first look at the paper, they registered confusion for about five seconds. Then their frowns were followed by an “Aha!” And in most cases, they went on to cast an affirmative vote for the flipped-out model.

The only folks who weren’t so impressed were those who never read the sports pages, anyway. Those readers spent more time looking at our Page 2 redesign. Most of them said they like the smaller index and space for breaking news.

So today we debut our clever changes, including the switch from “Play” as a section head to “Sports” to more accurately describe the coverage.

We hope you like the new look this last day of May. We can’t promise this is the last of the changes, but we can say we’re ready for another three-day weekend.

Press on the Internet? You bet

Editor's Notes

We've heard from a lot of old friends — and made some new ones, too — in the last few weeks.

Those are the folks who have stumbled onto our Web site, noticed a difference and told us what they think of it.

After seven years, tracypress.com has a new look and a lot more content than it's ever had before. We haven't said much about it yet, because we're just getting started. But people notice change. Some of them are our neighbors in Tracy , some are former residents and some are just passersby in cyberspace.

“I miss seeing the paper when I travel,” Curtis Marshall of Tracy wrote in an e-mail last week. “I look online almost every day when I am on the road and have wished for years that your site would be expanded. I was so happy when I saw the new format.”

I could almost smell the sea breeze from an e-mail of retired Tracy High School teacher Jim White, now living in Hawaii . “Bravo, bravo, thank you, thank you,” he gushed. “Mahalo for the new Web site.”

Some other former Tracy residents we heard from are Sandy Toon, now in Newport, Ore., Shelley Sipe in Santa Maria and Bob Nelson, who moved to Africa in January.

I told the Sunrise Rotary Club about the reworked Web site last week when I visited, and the members were surprised.

“You mean I could read all the Tracy Press stories on the Internet?” an incredulous George Stein asked. He represents a generation that is often peeved at change of the technological sort, but he said it's a good move. He said he'll still subscribe to the Tracy Press, which he has done since September 1946, but he promises he'll check it out online, too.

That's good news for those of us who watch the changing media landscape. Paid newspaper circulations have dropped all across the country as TV and the Internet and a multitude of publications compete for people's time and attention. Young people (anyone, say, younger than 40) aren't reading newspapers as voraciously as their parents did. Yet free, online access to newspaper Web sites continues to grow, with numbers that represent a definite upsurge in newspaper online readership.

Just in the last few weeks, we've counted 1,400 visitors a day on the Web site, which should be good news to potential advertisers. Meanwhile, we appreciate the comments from readers.

Speaking of feedback, I am still hearing from a smattering of TP readers who miss “Dennis the Menace” and dislike some of the new comic strips on our Laugh pages.

“I think comics should make you smile, if not laugh out loud, and at the very least make you feel good,” Jean Cornwell wrote in an e-mail. “I would rather be uplifted than browbeaten when I finally make it to the comics.”

Don Drummond wrote to express just how strongly he feels about our decision to add new comics.

“I now see that you are heading in a more hip and so-called mainstream direction, so I won't renew at the end of this period,” he said. “It is sad to see a small-town paper go the way of reality television, but you will go there with one less subscriber.”

The comic that replaced “Dennis” is a single panel called “ Ballard Street ,” which is one that some folks tell me is “growing on them.” Now I wonder if anyone would miss the new “ Ballard Street ,” with its weird suburbanite characters, if we put “Dennis” back in its place.

Who knows: Maybe something new can create loyalty that rivals something old. Just look at what's happening on the Web. Maybe there's room for both.

No dead comics society here

Editor's Notes

Twenty years ago, I studied the comic strips at the newspaper where I worked and set out to interview every artist/writer in the Sunday comics pages. I profiled each one in stories that ran every week for six months. I interviewed the beloved Charles Schultz right before I went into labor with my son, and then I wrote the story about him as soon as I got out of the hospital.

Last week — five years after the death of the Peanuts creator — we stopped running Schulz's comic strip reruns here at the Tracy Press. We also replaced the panel for Dennis the Menace, another nostalgic comic whose creator has passed on. And we said good-bye to some newer comics that seem to have attracted few followers.

For an editor, waking up to a typo in a front-page headline is painful, but cutting old comics strips to make room for new ones is torture. Change of any sort can bring on a barrage of angry phone calls from readers, so most newspapers avoid it.

For us, this time, only one caller has mentioned Peanuts. She said she's been reading about the antics of Linus and Charlie Brown since 1948, and although she knew she was reading reruns from the 1970s, she didn't care. She misses Peanuts.

A few other callers said they cared more about the disappearance of Dennis from our pages. One clipped out some old panels and wrote notes on them — “Bring back Dennis, please.”

Another left a message clearly stating her disgust with the decision: “It is most regrettable that someone replaced the adorable Dennis with a ludicrous, dimwitted cartoon, which I won't even look at.”

But the dozens of readers I've quizzed in the last few months say they're open to new comics. Some specifically asked for comics with an edge — like The Boondocks and Ballard Street. Some asked for a daily children's strip, and we found Slylock Fox. A few said they read Get Fuzzy in Saturday's Our Town and wanted it in the daily comics. More than a few said they really didn't like Six Chix and Franklin Fibbs.

And then there's Opus, requested by a 20-year-old who represents that non-newspaper-reading age group that editors long to reach. When I called the syndicate that distributes that cartoon, I found out that a competitive newspaper to the north bought rights that block us from using Opus, which is not funny at all.

Meanwhile, as we strive to be unique in Tracy, we've introduced quite a few new characters, and I'd like to know what you think of them. Some of the strips, like The Boondocks, offer more social commentary than comic relief. Author Aaron McGruder has been described as an unwavering voice of black consciousness, but he's also drawn criticism for being more “in your face” than “tongue in cheek.”

Ballard Street is a reminder of how strange people can be in Middle America with its women in large print dresses and men in baggy trousers. Get Fuzzy has Rob the human, Satchel the dog, and Bucky the cat. And Slylock Fox has a very witty fox, word and math games, visual mysteries and drawing lessons for kids.

So we've mixed it up a bit, in an effort to freshen up our Laugh pages, attract some new comics readers and keep the rest of you thinking and laughing. There's an array of talent out there in the comic strip kingdom, and we're not afraid to try something new — as long as we know you're reading.