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.