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Anders Gyllenhaal
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Anders Gyllenhaal is the editor of the Minneapolis Star Tribune, which unveiled a major redesign of its newspaper and Web site Wednesday. The 18-month redesign process, led by deputy managing editor for visuals Monica Moses, drew on every department of the Strib, as more than a dozen groups spent months debating how the new paper could best connect with readers. From 1997 to 2002 Gyllenhaal was executive editor of the News & Observer in Raleigh, N.C., which won the Pulitzer Prize for public service in his first year as managing editor in 1996. Gyllenhaal, 54, has edited the Star Tribune since 2002.
Edward B. Colby: The Star Tribune comes from a position of relative strength. Your parent company is one of the best performing [in the newspaper business], and your paper has been retaining readers better than most. Why such a major overhaul, and why now?
Anders Gyllenhaal: For just those reasons. This is the right time to confront the readership problems that all newspapers are seeing. From a position of strength, we think we can figure out how both to build on the foundations of the paper and also bring innovations into a new paper and Web site. I think we can see more clearly right now than ever in the past where newspapers have to get to, and so now is the time to start getting there.
EBC: How much pressure are you facing — from readers, from McClatchy, from yourself — for this redesign to be a success?
AG: Pressure isn’t the word I would use. There is a lot of interest, I think, from our readers. Ever since we started talking about it, we have been hearing from them, and [receiving] questions and suggestions. Certainly the paper itself sees this as a crucial time in a long history, and McClatchy is very interested in this paper — and all its papers — figuring out some new approaches and then sharing them, so that we can all benefit from them.
EBC: But you don’t feel like this is a make-or-break situation?
AG: Oh, no, no. But I guess I would add that when you look at where newspapers’ circulation and readership are going, we’ve certainly got to figure out some ways of confronting those trends, and particularly the lighter reader and younger reader and the disenfranchised reader.
EBC: You’ve made over 100 changes to the paper and Web site. Can you walk me through the most radical ones?
AG: Radical is probably not the right word. The most ambitious ones range from a new twice-a-week World section that tries to bring home international news to readers, to a new Sunday styles section called Signature that is aimed unapologetically at women readers and tries to cover everything from style and fashion to health and nightlife. We’ve made major changes to our feature section — it used to be called Variety, now Source — and it takes aim at a half-dozen major themes, alternating each day, and tries to be both the place where we’re capturing life in the Twin Cities of Minnesota, and also far more utilitarian. We have made many changes in coverage, from more business news, to health news and coverage of the Internet, and expanding our religion section.
And then there’s a whole lot of innovations — and this is where we’ve probably spent most of our energy — trying to figure out what are some of the ways that newspapers can do a better job and a new job of delivering information? Examples of those range from a front-page feature every day called “Have You Heard?” that tries to find five truly compelling “talk” stories and summarize them very briefly. … A new half-page in features that is called “Web Search” attempts to give our readers the best of what’s happening on the Internet, and both lead them to there and find the stories about that. The Internet is this massive, chaotic universe of content, and the newspaper tries to bring some guidance that you can’t get very many places right now.
There are many, many little features that I won’t go into in detail. So we’ve paged through the paper, every paragraph, and said, “Does this work? How can it work better?” And that’s led to a lot of really good things.
And then on top of that, another goal here is to do what all newspapers are trying to accomplish, which is figure out how we harness the paper and the Web site in a way that really work together. … So there are a lot of features that spring out of that goal, including a whole new science of navigation between the two.
EBC: You wrote on the redesign blog that the Star Tribune received about 800 phone calls and 800 emails from readers on the first day alone. What have been some of the most memorable — both positive and negative — responses you’ve gotten from readers so far?
AG: [W]e’re getting both, of course. If there are a couple of themes, there’s a lot of encouraging messages that say, “Yeah, I like this,” [and] there’s a lot of older readers, mostly, who say, “This is confusing, I don’t like this, I’m kind of lost.” That’s something we always expect. …
[T]here are a lot of directional questions that come up. In general, we think that the reaction reflects the intense interest that people have in their paper, but it’s also not a huge number. It’s a big number, it’s not a huge number, so that helps us feel like it’s going pretty well. But any change like this — and this is dramatic change, the paper hasn’t had a change like this in most of the lifetimes of our readers — we know that it’s a transition, it takes getting used to. …
EBC: A recent City Pages story said that “The process — replete with focus groups, consultants, and endless meetings — has dragged on for well over a year” and quoted metro columnist Doug Grow
saying that the paper’s staff has been distracted from its day-to-day journalistic work because of the redesign. “I think for months now a lot of our top editors have been focused on this project and not daily journalism,” he said. Is that a fair criticism?
AG: Not completely. I think most of us are proud of the papers that we’ve been putting out. We’ve had some extraordinary work throughout the period of time we’ve been working on this project. But it’s also true that it’s taken a tremendous amount of energy to go through this and to try to improve the paper and to invent new things. So, of course, there’s been attention being paid to that. We’re just delighted to have that work behind us so we can get back to focusing entirely on the newspaper and the Web site.
Edward B. Colby was a writer at CJR Daily.