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By D'ANN LAWRENCE WHITE | The Tampa Tribune

Published: February 16, 2007

You guessed it. The Brandon News is smaller, 3 inches shorter to be precise.

There's a practical reason and a not-so-practical reason for the change.

On the strictly practical side, the smaller size allows The Brandon News to be printed on The Tampa Tribune's presses in downtown Tampa. Those presses already are set up for that format, which happens to be the same size as the Friday Extra section, in case you didn't make the connection.
Previously, The Brandon News was printed at our sister newspaper, the Suncoast News, in New Port Richey.

Our parent company, Media General, wanted to take advantage of the high-quality color reproduction capabilities available on the newer presses. Technology allows us to offer advertisers spot color throughout the newspaper, thus giving the editorial side (we reporters, editors, photographers and graphic designers) more opportunity to use color photographs, charts and graphs.

Shortening the paper to 11 1/2 inches isn't only practical for the company. Studies by media pollsters indicate it's practical for the reader as well. They tell us that readers prefer a magazine-style format for community papers because they're less cumbersome to read on the go.

With busy schedules and time at a premium, people are able to take the smaller-sized newspaper with them to read in the waiting room at their doctor's office, on the bus, in the car to peruse while waiting to pick up their child from school or to the gym to read while sweating on the treadmill.

Now for the whimsical reason for the change.

Sometimes it's fun to shake things up, try something new, experiment a little.

Just as hair and clothing styles change, so, too, do layout styles. So, we took advantage of the change in presses to challenge our in-house graphic designer, Bryant Griffin, to come up with a new look for The Brandon News. It seemed like the ideal time since we were preparing to launch our new Web site simultaneously.

As longtime residents will tell you, The Brandon News has gone through many changes over its 48 years.

It began as a broadsheet, similar in size to The Tampa Tribune, and switched to the tabloid size in 1986, the trend of weekly newspapers at the time.

We concede our 2-week-old redesign is a work in progress. Some readers loved it, some hated it.
Change can be difficult. It took a while for me to warm up to the idea of long hair coming back in style for boys. However, last weekend I nearly cried when my husband brought my son home from the hair salon and all of his thick locks had been shorn.

One critic of The Brandon News' new look said she couldn't tell where the stories began and the ads ended. I have to admit I cringed when I saw the story-to-ad ratio last week. You'll see a big improvement this week.

The best thing about The Brandon News is its direct link to brandonnews.tbo.com, giving readers the ability to comment about the stories they read, post their own events and photos and read more about stories that interest them.

One of my biggest frustrations is there is never enough space to print everything that's going on in our busy community. With brandonnews.tbo.com, there's no limit to how many stories, events and photos we can post. And if someone forgets to send a calendar item to me before the deadline, now I can say, "No problem, just put it on the Web site."

Rusty Coats, tbo.com's general manager, and his team, who developed this Web site, envision it as a meeting place for Brandon, a kind of cyber coffee shop where residents can meet to talk about the important issues of the day, debate politics, complain about traffic on Lithia-Pinecrest Road, get caught up on what's happening in their community, maybe even take a potshot at the editor of The Brandon News for her latest column.

Are you ready? I'll meet you at brandonnews.tbo.com.

D'Ann White is editor of The Brandon News.

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