April 19–26, 2001

slant

Shrinkage!

by David Warner

You’ve seen the warning signs.

Cryptic little teaser ads strewn throughout the paper in the last few weeks, announcing that a change was gonna come.

The mood of the teasers varied.

Perky: "More bounce to the ounce."

Cocky, with a nod toward ecological correctness: "More city, less paper."

Suggestive: "Wrap your hands around our new package."

Believe it or not, there were plenty more bon mots suggested and, blessedly, rejected. (For instance, the delicate "Like a dog with diarrhea: Same crap, more squat.") But all were intended to send basically the same message:

Our pages are getting smaller, but somehow we’re fitting in all the stuff our readers love — and more! Or, as one technologically oriented staffer put it, "Smaller, lighter, all of the latest upgrades. And it’ll never, ever crash."

Why the change in page size? Same reason newspapers all over the country are changing formats: the escalating costs of newsprint. Broadsheet newspapers like the Philadelphia Inquirer and Los Angeles Times are getting slightly narrower, while tabloids like City Paper are getting an inch shorter.

Faced with making this slight adjustment, we decided the opportunity was ripe to make a larger one — that is, to make lots of other design changes we’d been meaning to make anyway. In other words, do everything at once. (The screaming from the production department has almost died down.)

Here’s a rundown of the changes premiering this week:

• Enough with the catchy names: We used to call the news section City Beat, for reasons deep in the primordial past. Now we call it (duh) News. We used to call our entertainment and events listings City Week. Now we call them (again duh) Listings. And we used to call our arts section Critical Mass, a portmanteau phrase for a catch-all department. Now we’ve partitioned the Mass into three cohesive sections: Arts (including coverage of theater, dance, books, visual and performance art), Movies and Music.

• The best movie section gets better: For years, our long-form film reviews and feature stories have been separated from their natural brethren, the Showtimes and Movie Shorts. Now they’re all together in one section, so you can read the full-length fulminations of Fuchs and Adams, then just a page or two away find short reviews and screening times of all the movies playing in the area in the coming week.

• Picks in place: Our Critics’ Picks, once scattered rather haphazardly through the listings with no particular regard for genre, are back where they belong. Arts picks live in the Arts section, music picks reside in, yes, the Music section and the gone-but-not-forgotten Sixpick gets replaced by the Mixpick: a page in the listings section where we feature those events that can’t quite be classified but also can’t be missed.

• Many Q’s: The somewhat mysteriously named interview feature 20 Questions (a misnomer, we were informed frequently by mathematicians, because there were never 20 questions) is no more. But the useful, readable Q&A format will appear throughout the book, under the rubric (another mindbender) "Q&A."

• Icepack gets Naked: Our ubiquitous and ever-popular columnist a.d. amorosi moves his Icepack column from the now-defunct Critical Mass section to Naked City, our urban life/style section.

• The Smartest Cartoonist on Earth? Seattle’s The Stranger has him. So does Chicago’s New City. Now City Paper has him, too, making us only the third alternative newsweekly in the country to carry the work of cartoonist Chris Ware, whose extraordinary comic strip and graphic novel Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth has been acclaimed in the New York Times, The New Yorker and lots of other highfalutin’ publications. But Chris is sure you City Paper readers won’t like his new strip "Rusty Brown." Swears we’ll regret running it, and expects we’ll get lots of puzzled, angry letters. ("Where are the jokes?") Maybe so, but if his meticulously drawn, melancholy, somewhat twisted drawings are indeed an acquired taste, we have no doubt it’s a taste you’ll acquire.

• Graphic differences: Editorial Design Director Brian Hogan, in a truly cooperative effort with Publisher Paul Curci and the entire staff, has realized a crisper, cleaner look for the paper which we think lives up to all those promises of big things in a smaller package.

• What hasn’t changed: Our commitment to serious, smart, thorough and sometimes thoroughly irreverent reporting on the political, social and cultural life of Philadelphia. If that changes, City Paper won’t be fit to wrap anchovies in.

Final note: In this week of transitions, there are two more I should mention. First, Fern Sternberg, estimable arts editor, has moved to New York, where her husband works in film production. She played an important role in helping organize and rethink our arts coverage, and we’re very grateful for all her hard work. And at the end of this week, our fine reporter Noel Weyrich leaves for Philadelphia Magazine, where we expect he’ll become an equally fine Senior Editor. Just one warning note to Philly Mag editor Loren Feldman: We’re not letting him out of here till he finishes his cover story.