Star Editor: Here's why your Star looks different these days

Our pages now use new fonts intended to increase readability. And they are laid out by a central Lee Enterprises design center, staffed by expert award-winning designers — including some who used to work here.

From Tucson, we write and edit local stories, take photographs and select national and international stories. We can choose from a budget of wire stories offered by Lee’s national desk or we can choose different stories that we think would interest Tucson readers.

We also continue to set daily priorities for each edition, deciding on which page — and where on each page — each local, national and international story should appear.

When we want to add local context to a story or edit it specifically for Tucson, we of course will continue to do that — we actually plan to do more of that going forward. But we also can choose national and international stories already edited by Lee’s national desk, letting us focus our local resources on covering local news.

We have had some growing pains as we learn how to plan our editions in a new way. We published some headlines that were too big considering the news value of the story they sat on top of, and we have adjusted that. We are still making tweaks to get things just right, and I hope you can see that we’re making progress.

We are blessed to produce a product every day that customers feel passionately about. When we publish an error, when we make a change, we understand that many readers take that personally. That is both hard to live up to, and a great honor.

In my experience, when we do something that changes the look of our print edition or our website, the reaction is typically swift and negative. Readers ask us to return whatever changed to the way it was before.

This time, the reaction I’ve heard from readers is almost evenly split. Every complaint about big headlines is balanced by a compliment about the new typeface. Each question about why we shrunk the type or the size of the pages — actually, neither changed — is followed by a note praising the new look as cleaner and easier to read.

However you feel about the changes, I appreciate your comments. I appreciate that you care about the Star, and that you take the time to tell us what you think.

Please continue to reach out. Because we are between offices and working remotely, the easiest way to reach me is via email, at jspitz@tucson.com