The first weekly edition of the Bath Chronicle has hit the streets today – complete with a new look.

Staff at the paper have spent the past few weeks preparing for the conversion from daily to weekly publication, and are now hoping readers will like what they see.

Peter Sands, director of The Editorial Centre, was brought in to create a new look, and his ideas have been developed to produce today’s first issue.

Editor Sam Holliday told holdthefrontpage: “It has gone as smoothly as can be expected. We are used to talking about ‘evolution not revolution’ and doing things slowly, but this is the complete opposite.

“We have had to distil a six-day-a-week paper into one, and to make it more complicated for ourselves we have given the paper the biggest and most radical redesign it has ever had.

“Staff have not only had to adapt to different deadlines, but also work to a totally new design and I’m impressed with how they have adapted so quickly.”

Today’s front page

The Chronicle masthead remains the same, but headline fonts and sizes have been changed and the paper is now working to a baseline grid concept to give it a cleaner more uniform design throughout.

Content was also reviewed.

Sam said: “We couldn’t get everything in that we had done before, but we have covered all existing bases – just presenting them in a different way to give a more in-depth read.

“For example we have five daily columnists and these are now all on one double-page spread.”

The new-look back page

As a daily paper the Chronicle was one of the smallest papers in the country in terms of circulation, selling between 11,000 and 15,000 a day depending on the day of the week, and Sam is keeping new weekly circulation targets close to his chest.

He said: “Obviously we have a set print run because we’ve had to, but we don’t know whether we will end up pulping copies or have to re-print.

“None of us know what we are going to sell and we have even set up a staff competition to win an iPod if anyone can guess what the first week sale will be.

“There are so many factors to consider, but hopefully we will gain some readers that we perhaps lost as a daily but will give us a chance as a weekly.

“I’ve heard extremes at both ends of the scale, but I will be disappointed if we sell anything less that we did as a daily.”