Former Courant City Editor Les Gura is now the senior editor of continous news at the Winston-Salem Journal. His paper recently underwent the same web-reduction process as The Courant and other papers, causing the editors there to rethink the entire product and its front page.

Here’s Les’s description of the process, and a look at a typical new cover.

As someone interested in the future of newspapers, thought I’d share with you a copy of today’s front page of ours. Late last year, we redesigned to accommodate the new 44” Web width, a narrowing being done by the majority of U.S. papers. We took the opportunity, as a newspaper, to reconsider what we are doing. Along with my co-senior editor on the production side, we led a committee of 12 from throughout the newsroom in studying what we do best with a smaller staff, what people wanted (we took a survey of folks ourselves) and how to accommodate the narrowing. Instead of simply trying to do everything we’ve always done except in a smaller format, we went to a new format.

 The front page is now typically 3 stories, most of which are local. We’ve done two stories on some days when the story is strong and the art/graphics are potent. The standard is to try to give people ‘more’, whether more in-depth than other media on continuing stories, or more photos/graphics. More local.

 The old metro section is gone, and the local content our news reporters produce comes first in a combined A section in which national/international is shoved behind. The A section thus is 18 to 24 pages (depending on ads) in which the order typically is local news (page 2 and 3 are usually runovers from A1), national/international, national business (all locally produced biz stories go in the local news section now, unless we’re overloaded and can’t fit it elsewhere. hey, you gotta be able to break rules once in a while), local obits, editorial page.

 The second section is Sports. And from Wednesday-Sunday there is some sort of 3rd Living section, in which every cover features a locally produced centerpiece.

 Reader reaction has been interesting. Not as many cancellations as we feared. A general outcry in letters to editor about ‘dumbing down’ of the paper, seen through the reduction of national/international news. Sad thing is, if we were selling any ads, there’d be more national/international news because there’d be more partial pages in A section. Oh well.

 Anyway, the goal is to focus local since so many readers have gotten their other news elsewhere by the time we hit the doorstep. And the key, of course, in the redesign is not to put four to six stories on the front page, because inevitably, that would be dumbing down; you’d have any old story making A1 just because of the local news demand (as, say, our competitor in Greensboro has done). Our goal is that the A1 offers must be almost like mini-Sunday pieces in that they’re more in-depth, well-written or delivering important news.

 Likewise, we try not to default to a wire story when things aren’t looking good. We push for the best local thing we can do in the morning meeting and build from there. It’s a challenge (especially with dreaded ‘furloughs’ all year), but it’s made life interesting. I think the idea, basically, it to turn the paper into a more magazine-like publication. And I see that as our future, too. I can foresee the day when our daily efforts all go to Web and the product we deliver will be maybe once a week like a local version of Time or Newsweek.