A Johnston Press-owned weekly has ditched its traditional Gothic masthead in a redesign to mark its 160th anniversary.
The Morpeth Herald – which went “compact” last year – unveiled the new look in its latest edition published last week.
As part of the revamp, the weekly has shed its old-style masthead and replaced it with wording in a more “contemporary-looking” type face, bringing it in line with sister titles.
The paper was launched on April 1, 1854, and became a “compact” last year, having previously been a broadsheet for all of its existence.
Editor Paul Larkin said: “This is great news for our readers. The demand for news in paper format is still very much there but we have to fit in with hectic lifestyles and technological advances.
“The new-look Gazette embraces embrace those innovations – the likes of social media, mobile phone apps while not forgetting our core values and principles.
“It’s great that we can also co-incide the redesign with the celebrations for our 160th birthday.”
He said the paper’s compact edition had been well-received and the redesign was the next step in the publication’s evolution.
However St James’ Evening Post website blogger Matthew said by changing the masthead the paper had moved away from the compromise between the old broadsheet and the new compact.
He wrote that: “The Morpeth Herald is much more recognisably a Johnston Press weekly, adopting the same headline and text fonts as its northerly neighbours the Northumberland Gazette, Berwick Advertiser, Berwickshire News and Southern Reporter.”
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Would you seriously want to buy a newspaper to read that cubs are taking over the town hall?
Sorry to be so cynical early on a Monday morning but it looks so BORING, BORING, BLOODY BORING!
(Ps I have no connection with Morpeth or JP).
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Re the question posed by ‘Back to basics’. If I knew one or some of the cubs, damn right I’d buy it. But even if I didn’t know them or had no interest in what the local cub group was up to, I would be interested in similar items of information from the area in which I lived or worked. Local matters, regardless of how trivial it may seem.
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New one looks shocking. I would have kept the old one. You can evolve and modernise without taking away the one thing that has been constant for so many years and is what readers identify with. If you look at some of the most successful brands in the world, say Coca Cola or Ford, they don’t mess with their brands.
All seems a bit gimicky.
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“The demand for news in paper format is still very much there but we have to fit in with hectic lifestyles”
This is one of my favourite cliches, that of the “hectic, modern lifestyle”. Yes, because life was so much more easy when people worked down coal mines/in factories/shipyards.
Look how much time people spend posting pictures of their cats on Facebook and uttering nonsense on Twitter (*raises hand*) and you realise that the exact opposite is true.
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