In Stephen King’s 2008 book Just After Sunset, which I’ve just finished reading, there are 13 short stories.
They are tales of the supernatural, violence and near violence, obsessive compulsion, wild imagination, confinement and redemption.
Which brings me to the subject of this newspaper’s redesign.
Like so many things in life, the process of creating a new look and feel for a newspaper is a lot harder than it looks. So yes, it involved all of the above noted elements in the King book, at one time or another.
Read Also
Crop insurance’s ability to help producers has its limitations
Farmers enrolled in crop insurance can do just as well financially when they have a horrible crop or no crop at all, compared to when they have a below average crop
The results lie before you.
If we were to compare the throes of a newspaper redesign to the equivalent in farm and ranch activities, the complexity might be similar to comparing disease resistance, drought tolerance, days to maturity and yield characteristics in choosing varieties for next year’s crops.
Or it might be like pondering the innumerable permutations in bull sale and semen catalogues and comparing current herd strengths with herd sire and dam EPDs, birth weights, weaning weights, calving ease and milking ability while deciding the breeding plan.
King is a master of his genre but he also writes interesting notes to introduce and conclude his books. These notes are addressed to Constant Reader. King has many.
It’s the constant readers of The Western Producer for whom we’ve tried to create a more dynamic, modern and accessible newspaper by means of this redesign.
After our constant readers told us what they liked and wanted in their newspaper, we did some imagining and pondering and fulminating and then we asked some newspaper design experts to help us achieve a new look that would serve readers better.
Their creativity, professionalism and encouragement bordered on the supernatural and we are grateful for their talent and effort.
The new design minutia of fonts and leading and style and headlines and captions and refers and jump-lines and other newspaper-speak are best left to speak for themselves.
After they do, I hope you will speak to us about what you think of it.
