The rumors are true. We have a new format. We had been thinking about newsprint for almost a year now. This March, we surveyed our readers. Working from more than a hundred responses, our team—led by art director Laura Coombs, editors Samuel Medina and Marianela D’Aprile, and publisher Nicolas Kemper—mapped out a new course. While the writing and art received a lot of love and praise, most of the readers were also ready for a different format. They found the page progression confusing—or, to quote a few respondents:
“The folding/pagination is really baffling to me.”
“I never know what page is first, what is the hierarchy of pieces or intended flow.”
“I truly hate how it’s bound.”
So we sought out a vehicle that would be bound and easy to read, eventually arriving at a form very true to our city: the stapled tabloid.
We took a different approach to the content. Whereas previously, almost all of the articles appeared as a continuous scroll with minimal differentiation—the “open floor plan” approach to a publication—NYRA now has front, back, and side doors, connected…