In 2011, PGN is poised to celebrate its 35th year. With this anniversary, we are updating our look — hopefully, you noticed the front page — and will be tweaking our content. For the most part, the changes are cosmetic and aesthetic but, hopefully, readers will be able to get more valuable information quickly.
Here’s a short list of changes: front-page redesign, updated headline font, reduced table of contents and new column signatures.
We switched to a standard four-column format (from five columns), which will standardize our ad sizes and shapes. For the news section, we will try to maintain the progression of local, national and international, depending on space and newsworthiness.
If all goes well, we’ll have a few new columnists as well.
We moved the bulk of the directories to the middle of the paper, between news and arts, so that they can be more integrated with the content. This also allows us to run complementary content for those sections.
The “Detour” section — PGN’s arts and entertainment section — is now “Arts & Culture” and will have its own contents listing on the section page. The “Diversions” events listings are now “Out & About.” For the latter, we will now list events chronologically by day, Friday to Friday, as well as provide a list of stage performances and exhibits, divided into opening, closing and continuous. We’ll also be highlighting four events with photos instead of two and streamlined our TV listings.
We have a couple of goals with our updates. First, we’d like to be more engaging and more reader-friendly. With our headline adjustments, we are going for a cleaner look so that we can convey more information, more rapidly. With the front page, we are hoping to showcase more of our content, providing smaller pieces to interest busy readers.
Other changes in the works include adding more local lifestyles features, freshening up some colors and ensuring there is art with every article (to the best of our ability). There may be more coming; we’ll let you know as they come.
It’s been a few years since PGN’s last facelift, so you’ll have to let us know what you think.
Tell us what you like, what you don’t, what you miss, what you love.
As always, we appreciate your feedback.
Our mission is to be a medium for communication for the LGBT community, internally and externally. And we need to know if we are meeting — or missing — that goal.