The Herald loses weight

We wrote at the bottom of our front page today: “No, your hands didn’t get bigger.”
And it’s probably a good thing, because today’s Herald FELT much smaller than it ever has.
That’s because beginning today, your Herald will be an inch slimmer per page, and we hope you don’t think this move is the “next step” in The Herald either becoming a tab-sized paper or doing away with paper for good. It’s actually a move many other papers have already made to save money and to fight against the ever-rising cost of newsprint.
To use the newspaper industry lingo, we’ve reduced our “web width” from 48 inches to 44 (divide them by 4, and you get the inch count of an average page).
The following is a better explanation from the Newspaper Association of America:

By reducing its web width from 60 to 48 inches, The Wall Street Journal saved $18 million in newsprint last year, says Paul Cousineau, director national production for Dow Jones & Co. in Princeton, N.J.
Currently … the 44-inch web width was the smallest in the newspaper industry.
In August 2006, the Visalia Times-Delta (average daily circulation, 19,645) and the Tulare Advance-Register (6,302) were the first Gannett newspapers to reduce their web widths to 44 inches (“Two California Papers Drop to 44-Inch Web,” November 2007, p. 50). They were soon followed by The Spectrum in St. George, Utah (22,352), and The Californian in Salinas (16,175).
The Indianapolis Star will go to a 44-inch web width in February, and The Courier-Journal in Louisville will do so in March, says Austin Ryan, vice president of production for Gannett’s Newspaper Division.
“There is definitely an opportunity for cost savings here,” he says. Gannett newspapers with reduced web widths have experienced an 8 percent gross savings for all consumables, he adds.

If none of that put you to sleep, basically it’s saying it saves us money.
As for our product, nothing will change other than the width. Our font size will be reduced by a very, very small percentage, one that’s not very noticable unless you’ve been staring at our paper for hours on end each day, like I have.
If you have any complaints (or even a good thing to say) about the new size, e-mail me at bliggett@sanfordherald.com