The new tabloid Asian edition of the Wall Street Journal hit the streets on Monday but a media analyst was sceptical whether the new look worked.
The business newspaper started its new era with a front-page story, beneath a headline in conservative small type, about United States Treasury Secretary John Snow’s visit to China.
An open letter to readers from editor Reginald Chua said the format, smaller than the former broadsheet, had been adopted for readers’ convenience.
“The compact format is designed to make it easier to navigate through the paper,” Chua wrote.
An editorial dedicated to the relaunch added that the newspaper, whose European edition will also be reformatted, had been designed to complement the Journal‘s successful online version.
“The [internet’s] blitz of information has made it harder for the busy reader to sort the important from the ephemeral, and to decipher meaning from the rush of events,” it said.
“This is where we think editors still have a role to play,” it added.
The Asian edition’s sister publication was first published in New York in 1889.
Publisher Dow Jones announced the relaunch in May, sparking production and editorial jobs losses in Asia and Europe while others were moved to the paper’s headquarters in New York.
The move comes a year after Dow Jones axed the weekly edition of its highly regarded news magazine, the Far Eastern Economic Review.
In the redesign, old fashioned typefaces and use of capitals in headlines have been jettisoned.
The paper has also increased its use of photographs and reduced the number of line-etching graphics.
Story lengths have been shortened considerably and there are fewer of them.
A media analyst said it was unclear whether the new look worked.
“It does look better — a bit more modern — but it still looks like it is stuck in another century,” said media commentator and Hong Kong Baptist University journalism lecturer Tim Hamlett.
“They say tabloids are easier to carry, but I never heard anybody complain that broadsheets were difficult to navigate. The Journal is presumably read by people with desks large enough to hold a broadsheet,” he added.
A media agent who has sold advertising space for the paper said last week she thought advertisers may have trouble fitting their ads into the new format.
“There may be an issue in terms of ad sizes — they will have to be much smaller — but advertisers and media planners would be able to work around that,” said Alice Ng, an executive at Carat Media Services. – AFP