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WSJ Unveils New Design, ‘Reader’s Guide’

The Wall Street Journal unveiled its new design today, and it included a letter from publisher L. Gordon Crovitz explaining what readers can expect from the paper, during a time of change in the newspaper business.

“Do we reserve the icon as it has been, rejecting change as too risky? Or do we try to add to the qualities that created the icon in the first place, taking care not to change simply for the sake of change?” he writes. The latter approach is the one the paper will take, making the Journal “more essential” to readers than ever, according to Crovitz.

The letter points to a reader’s guide (PDF) which highlights what has been changed and why.

Physical changes include a narrower width and new typeface. The Journal is also increasing the percentage of articles that talk about facts, trends, ideas and analysis, which Crovitz claims “you won’t see anywhere else.” To date, a little more than half of the paper was devoted to this kind of coverage. In the future, the paper aims to give over 80 percent of the Journal’s coverage to these “what-it-means” stories. The paper’s high percentage of those stories, to date, was in large part responsible for the fact that Journal subscribers are up 10 percent this year, during a time when most major metropolitan papers are struggling with subscriber losses, he writes.