SANTA CRUZ SENTINEL
Santa Cruz, Calif.

The Sentinel, an Ottaway Newspaper, had experienced a difficult but envious market shift. Once a busy resort town, it had slipped into economic hard times after the earthquake of 1989, which damaged many of its downtown buildings. But in the late 1990s, the Silicon Valley boom just over the mountains in San Jose was spilling over into Santa Cruz County. More urban, sophisticated workers were moving into Santa Cruz. Housing prices soared. The economy was red hot. But the paper looked and felt small town and dated. Its design and content was generic.

The other bad news was that The Sentinel’s market was being assaulted by the big-city San Jose Mercury News and the town’s two alternative papers, which were both fat with ads.

We tried to combine both a Western and sophisticated California look to the design to give the paper more local character. The A-section was expanded with more national and international news. A new features editor and a newsroom reorganization, initiated by our company, brought new life to content. As another focal point of the redesign, we made the inside pages mimic those at bigger metro papers - by using more and better-edited photos and better, more modular page design

The redesign resulted in a rise in newsstand sales and was very well received by readers.

Carolyn Flynn and Bill Ostendorf served as designers. Both were on hand (along with Carolyn’s newborn twins) for the launch. Bill handled the training, followup and management consulting portions of the project and was the project coordinator. One other designer provided feedback and input.