It was February whena dozen or so people sat around a table in a conference room at the Erie Times-News and askedwhat the November 2019 merger of GateHouse Media and Gannett would mean for the newspaper and its readers.
My answer to the Reader Advisory Board then was the same as it is when I'm asked that question now.
Our place in Gannett's USA Today Network means we'll havetools we've never had in our 132 years as a local business and thousands of new co-workers eager to lend their expertise to our missionof serving the Erie community in ways we never could before.
The difference in the answer, 10 months later, is in the detail. A lot of detail.
Merging companies that employ tens of thousands of people isn't simple. Doing it during a pandemic that's forced the majority of those people into remote work complicates it further. It's taken all of the year-plus since the merger to reach critical mass at the Times-News. But if 13 months seems a long time, know that it's been a dizzying pace.
Most of what's happened has been internal,changes that readers haven't seen and won't — hardware swaps and software upgrades, workflow changes and ways of communicating.
The unseen evolution will continue. But the most visible elements will arrive starting this week.
On Wednesday, a redesigned Times-News will be delivered to subscribers and available at newsstands. It's the first significant change to the print newspaper since October 2016.
Most important things first: The size of the type is not changing. Cartoons haven't been touched, nor puzzles. The obituaries index will remain on page A2.
Our typefaces will change and, coupled with a design philosophy that features a four-column gridinstead of the current five, and which values white space, you should find the pages easier to read.
What's on those pages will change, too. We'll be able to spend less time with the hidden but necessary and time-consuming production work that goes into publishing a daily newspaper and spend more time reporting stories that matter for print and digital readers;making award-winning photos and videos; andinvesting our time in the community in ways that matter most in a post-pandemic era for which we all ache. That might be off-the-record meetings with community groups, or Editorial Board meetings, or the return ofpopular mass-audience events that the Times-News has sponsored for years.
Not every feature will make the leap to the new Times-News.
Good Morning, a column written for decades by staff writers, will go from six days a week to Saturdays. There were enough reporters when I started in 1999 that a person might write five or six Good Morning columns in a year's time. The rotation recently required reporters to produceone every two weeks. As popular as Good Morning is, that's time that can be better used on daily and enterprise news work.
We'll no longer publish lottery results. They're readily available immediately after the drawings in any number of places. And the 3 Things To Do list on page A2 also has been eliminated. We'll look forward to publishing long lists of events when the weekly Showcase entertainment section returns and to offering countless options for things to do on GoErie's online calendar.
Starting Wednesday there won't be an op-ed page, next to the editorial page, other than on Sundays and special occasions. That means fewer syndicated opinion columnists.It's part of a greater shift in howwe'll approach opinions and community engagement, focusing on local and state issues, thatI'll write more about Dec. 20.
And the technical and workflow implementation that will be finalized with the redesign means we can finally easily share more work done by our sister newsrooms in the USA Today Network. The Erie Times-News is the largest of Gannett's markets in Pennsylvania, but just one of 14 in the state. We'll collaborate ondaily, investigative and in-depth news that matters to all residents, and we'll also share more of the stories and photos that are uniquely Pennsylvanian.
One thing the Times-News won't do this year is publish a Christmas Day print edition. That was the case for decades, until the mid-2000s. The decision to renew that tradition was made a year ago at this time.It allows all of our employees some or all of a special dayto rest and spend time with their families, which matters to us in any year but especially this one. Go to www.GoErie.com on Christmas Day for the latest news.
If you're not a GoErie subscriber, this month is a great time to give it at try. We have a lineup of articles planned that you won't find elsewhere — about critical issues, but also history, your neighbors, the holidays and the year behind and ahead — and a trial offerstarting at 99 cents at www.goerie.com/subscribenow. Print subscribers who aren't visiting GoErie are using just part of what you're paying for; there arecountless more articles online as well as photo galleries and videos, an e-edition that includes daily sections you can't get in print and access to the GoErie mobile and tablet apps.
We hope you like the new Erie Times-News. It comes with a promise: Print or online, our commitment is to the community in which you and we live and work. Expect to see the question put to me nearly a year ago blossom into avisible, measurable answerin the days and months to come.
Matt Martin is the executive editor of the Erie Times-News. Emailmmartin@timesnews.com. Follow him on Twitter @etnmmartin.
