Design: Jon Housman on the new compact WSJ Europe

newspaper techniques: What has the reaction been like to the new format so far from readers and advertisers?

Jon Housman: I can give you both sides, and actually, I think they’re related. They’re both very positive to give you the short answer. We know this from various channels.

One is that we track all the letters and other comments that come in from readers.

Two, is that we’ve actually done a few follow-up surveys, some of which are the kind of thing we do on a regular basis so we’re able to compare it to previous data as well as to some new surveys we’ve done and some of these are qualitative and some are quantitaive. On all the various channels, we’re hearing very positive things.

In general, readers find the new format more modern, a little bit easier to read and navigate, they’re spending a little more time on it, and just finding the paper in general more appealing. So, it’s very gratifiying. Even on the area of letters and e-mails, where if you ask anybody who’s done a redesign or a relaunch, you’ll hear from them that’s where you get a lot of angry e-mails from. Because people who are sort of annoyed at you. The vast majority of people who like it don’t write, and the people who you expect to write are the ones who really don’t like it very much. Even there, we’ve gotten a majority of very positive comments, and some from people who say they’ve been reading the paper for 10 or 20 years.

We’ve been getting them from all the countries that we distribute in, a lot of letters from Germany, France, Switzerland, Belgium, U.K., etc., etc. and we’re very gratified by it.

newspaper techniques: How were both groups, readers and advertisers, prepared for the new format?

Jon Housman: On the advertiser side, I’ll tell you that first. Here again from various channels, we’ve been hearing very positive things. And here I would say it’s both partly anticdotal, which is we get various feedback from advertisers, clients, agency people, in some cases we ask them what they think and they tell us and in some cases they just e-mail us and tell us.

Also, as we look at advertiser performance, it’s been extremely positive. I believe we are actually the only compact launch to go up in advertising rather than down. It’s public, so I can tell you, we released our November linage, which in Europe was up over 40 percent, which is massive in the newspaper world. So, we’re seeing very positive responses across the board.

newspaper techniques: What did you do to prepare advertisers and readers for the changes you were making?

Jon Housman: On the advertiser front, one thing which I think is important, is we worked very closely with Mario Garcia, who was the lead consultant in the redesign, and he says this himself, he’s worked on a couple hundred of these kinds of things and he said this is the only one he worked on in which the advertising was actually part of the redesign process and not some leaf overlay at the end of the process or some kind of add-on, but really built into the architecture, and so a lot of the ad packages and positions and things like that that were a part of this were designed from the get-go.

And we solicitated feedback from advertisers on the kinds of things they value. We showed them interium versions as we modified the format, we let them know about it and showed them different versions and really worked with them I think to make this the best launch that we could do.

On the reader side, this was announced back in May and what we did was we put in a how-to-read guide, which is basically like an 8-page mini-newspaper inside the newspaper a couple of weeks before the actual newspaper began … and so if you were a subscriber or buy it on the newsstand you’d get this mini-newspaper in the newspaper with a letter from Karen House, who is the global publisher, with a letter from Mario Garcia, with a couple pages on the design history of the Journal, with all of the online benefits, which is really an important part for our audience and one of the reasons I think it’s been successful, is the online package that we’ve put together for this. And so that also I think kind of prepped everybody for the change.

newspaper techniques: How was the staff prepared for the change? What was their reaction?

Jon Housman: From my point of view, very positive. It’s probably no secret that a lot of newspapers could take years in many cases to do something like this. Without a very positive reaction from the staff I don’t think this could have been executed in such a short period of time.

I think the change made sense. Again, it’s not just a one-dimensional change of format but the whole nature of the offering changing, really made sense to people, so people really bought in. By the way, when we announced, one of the things we did was fly both the Europe and Asia teams, which launched together, over to Hong Kong for this announcement and started the planning right then. So everybody, both Europe and Asia teams, heard it together and started working on this together and the response was really very strong, very positive.

Interview conducted by Brian Veseling, senior editor for newspaper techniques.

Page first published: 13.02.2006