News

It all started with reimagination.

In the spring of 2005, the newspaper industry worldwide was aflutter with premature pronouncements of doom. Circulations were in serious decline, with the ever-expanding Internet widely fingered as the bogeyman (a convenient dodge given that the erosion of circulation predated the advent of the online world).

At The Globe, we were feeling reasonably good about ourselves. We had come out on top after a bitter newspaper war. Our share of the ad market was growing, paid circulation was rising and we were garnering more than our fair share of editorial awards. Moreover, we had never viewed the Web as competition, but rather as an exciting new means of telling Globe stories to Globe readers. The Wall Street Journal even wrote an article about us as an industry success story.

Still, we didn't want to fall into the complacency trap. I told the Wall Street Journal reporter that the industry appeared headed for a cliff and being at the back of the line, while better than the front, was of no lasting comfort. Two great questions hung in the air: What was a newspaper about in a digital world and what would the Internet be when it grew up? We needed to think through the onrushing future and how best to serve the three and a half to four million Canadians who read our paper and magazines or visit our websites.

And so we launched our reimagination process. We began by commissioning a large piece of market research and bringing in industry experts to speak to everyone in the company. We then put out a call for volunteers. Nearly a third of our employees stepped forward, representing all parts of the company. We put them into teams and asked each to tackle a specific area of opportunity, keeping in mind four overarching goals: We wanted to be smarter, more accessible, more Web-paper integrated and more visually oriented.

Oh yes. And we didn't want to give up an inch of ground on the qualities (strong reporting, great writing, seriousness of purpose) that have made The Globe and Mail an important part of Canadian society for more than 160 years.

In between doing their normal jobs, the team members retired into a meeting area quickly dubbed the "reimagination room." There, they laid the basis of the changes you will see next week, certainly the most extensive modernization of the newspaper since it went colour in 1998 and, throwing the Web into the mix, one of the most profound changes in generations.

Among the conclusions the teams reached when they emerged from their shroud of deliberations, was a view that the Monday-to-Friday paper needed to broaden its appeal along the lines of the weekend edition. They felt a better balance should be found between what readers need to know and what they want to know. This argument fit in well with a concept we had discussed a lot over the previous three years: that of "the whole reader." The groups concurred we served our readers well in their roles as citizens and economic players, were improving in relating to them as consumers, but still had a way to go in addressing them adequately as individuals and family members.

Out of all this came Globe Life, an intelligent look at the world closest to you: your health, your fitness, what you eat and drink, what goes into your home, your life at the office, your issues with family and other relationships. With Globe Life, we add an entire new section to the paper Monday to Friday and a new hub on globeandmail.com.

Other groups generated other ideas and insights. We needed a smarter way to report on the activities of financial markets. The days of acres and acres of newsprint being devoted to yesterday's stock listings are over. We were told to further build up our online capacities and to make the market listings pages in the paper more forward looking.

Thus was born ReportonBusiness.com, also launching Monday. It will bring together all our business and investment news, comment and tools into a single portal, replete with a tackle box full of new data streams. In the newspaper itself, the financial data pages will retain a base of information about the previous day's markets, but add new analytical features designed to provide the means for investors to render better trading judgments today.

A design group, asked to look at how people could work better together in generating and presenting content, came back with an answer that surprised us. It all starts with the physical layout of our office, which they felt provided a huge obstacle to creativity across disciplines. So we redesigned the newsroom to accomplish the overall goal of more openness and teamwork and the specific goals of bringing together both the visual and words people and the Web and newspaper people. As the founding editor of globeandmail.com, I had purposely located our little insurgency at the farthest end of the newsroom to protect it in its incubation stage. Now it has moved to the centre of the newsroom, with many of its editors spread throughout.

And so on Monday, you will encounter a Globe and Mail both familiar yet different. The quality and authority of the content remain the same. But the look and feel of the paper will change and our journalists will have more tools available to tell their stories.

The secret that made the redesign possible lies in new typefaces custom-made for us: Globe and Mail Text, News and Sans. They are, at one and the same time, more efficient and more readable. This, in turn, has allowed us to trim the width of the paper to 12 inches, the same size as the new Wall Street Journal and the future size of The New York Times, without losing content on the page. The cost savings from shaving the margins have been plowed back into the product, primarily in adding Globe Life and hiring an additional 30 journalists for a variety of Web and paper functions.

In the end, the goal is to deliver a better and broader Globe and Mail. Along the way, as editorial art director David Pratt and designer David Woodside experimented in the reimagination room over recent months, we have asked readers for their feedback. Most didn't notice the format change. Among those who did, they almost universally preferred the trimmer size. They felt that quality was determined by content and design not by width and that the paper was easier to read.

They also found it more pleasurable. The overall effect of the redesign, these readers stated, makes the paper fresher, livelier, more vibrant, more modern and both more universal and more diverse. As for Globe Life, they welcomed it as a better reflection of the multiple dimensions of their own lives. "This represents more of what my life is about," said one. "The Globe is the meal. Life is dessert," added another.

In the end, though, it always comes down to the content. The answer to our initial question about the future role of the Web and paper is that our Internet sites provide a better environment for breaking the news of the day, for digging deeply into areas of interest and for interacting directly between journalist and reader and among readers themselves. The newspaper provides one-stop shopping of the goings on of the past 24 hours and puts the world around us into perspective. It is a package, often beautifully wrapped, that emphasizes a hierarchy of importance and allows for the serendipity of discovery. It brings together the news and its meaning.

And they are not competitors. The Web flows into the paper, and the paper into the Web.

Something old, something new. We hope you enjoy this next generation of The Globe and Mail.

Edward Greenspon

Editor-in-chief