The Edmonton Journal is now in the transition phase of their plan to go all colour. And to close down their own printing plant.
Ironically, the "old presses" they mention from 1980 were bought and installed in East Edmonton to provide some colour in the daily paper to meet competition from the new kid on the block, The Edmonton Sun. Before that, the Journal had published Downtown and enjoyed a monopoly ever since the Edmonton Bulletin folded on January 20, 1951.
Journal print edition moving to sleek, full-colour look
By Lucinda Chodan, Editor-in-chief, Edmonton Journal
August 19, 2013
EDMONTON - The Journal begins a transition to a sleek new format and a more colourful print edition Monday [August 19].
By the end of August, all copies of the newspaper will be printed at a new printing facility in St. Albert.
The new presses will allow us to offer better quality reproduction and colour on every page, something that was not possible on our old presses, which date back to 1980.
The new format is slightly slimmer and shorter than the version we have been printing for the last several years. The newspaper page becomes six millimetres narrower and about 70 millimetres shorter (that’s about a quarter-inch narrower and about 2.75 inches shorter for those who are more comfortable with Imperial measures).
While the page is smaller, the type is not. We have retained the same typeface and type size for articles in the new-format Journal.
Monday is the first day of a transition phase during which we will ensure everything is working well and we are able to deliver newspapers to all our home subscribers. The new Great West Newspapers facility in St. Albert features brand-new presses that have not yet printed a full run of the Journal. So for the next two weeks, some Journals will be printed in St. Albert on the new-size newsprint and others on the existing newsprint supply on our old presses.
That means some newspapers will have the new, smaller image size printed on the old, larger newsprint; this will result in some extra white space along the edges of the paper.
Also, during the transition period, not all pages will appear in colour because the newspaper will be printed in two parallel runs on the two presses. When the transition is complete, which will be on or before Aug. 29, all pages will be full colour.
We have had to make a few adjustments to correspond to the new format.
The most significant changes occur on our daily comics page from Monday to Friday, where we have eliminated four comics: Non Sequitur, Get Fuzzy, Chuckle Bros. and Cornered.
About 1,800 readers took part in a comics survey in July and helped us choose which comics would be eliminated on the new, shorter daily page. There will be no changes to the four pages of colour comics in the Saturday edition, which means Get Fuzzy will continue to live on in that weekly Saturday comics package.
Our puzzles and games pages were also reconfigured and redesigned. The weekly Aces on Bridge question-and-answer column in the Saturday edition has been dropped, although Aces on Bridge remains in print Monday to Saturday. We have stopped publishing Myles Mellor’s weekly Diagramless puzzle, which appeared on Saturdays, as well as Isaac Asimov’s daily Super Quiz. And we have moved Sudoku to the puzzle page every day.
You will also see new shapes for some familiar features, such as our daily weather map, which now is more colourful. But apart from that, the content of the Journal remains virtually unchanged.