Gazette moving away from daily color comics

There’s little question that the addition of color changed the experience of television and cinema in profound ways — with historians crediting it with changing how people see the world.

When it comes to the use of color in newspapers, however, color hasn’t been as defining to the experience. Color can help stories and images stand out, and the use of color can convey emotional responses. But not every story has a photo or needs color to provide context to readers.

The Gazette is going to be making some changes with the use of color in coming weeks.

The moves will help keep us on solid financial footing, and help us put an emphasis on preserving newsgathering resources. Keeping newsgatherers in the community is essential, while color is a nice to have.

The most notable changes will be to the daily comics and the pages featuring the weather and television grid, though additional pages will convert to black & white in coming weeks.

There’s long been a sense of pride around the color comics page — a decision made when we ran our own printing press many years ago. Very few, if any, newspapers have maintained daily comics these days.

The Sunday comics will remain in color.

Beginning next week, we’ll also reduce the color in the TV Week book that some subscribers opt to receive. We’ll continue to provide the same information, but the color accents aren’t essential to making sense of the programming schedules.

We’ll continue to run color weather graphics on the front page, which made it easier to convert the weather page to black and white.

Printing color pages costs more than the traditional black and white pages. There’s multiple colors of ink, and there are more plates (which are essentially the design or instructions to the printing press).

Our plan is to continue to offer color comics and pages in the Green Gazette digital replica. We encourage all readers to familiarize themselves with the Green Gazette, as access is part of your subscription, and you can access years-worth of editions from your mobile phone, tablet or computer.

The Gazette is committed to continuing to provide the quality local news coverage that you expect. In this case, reducing the amount of color is important to helping us best deliver on that promise.

Thanks for reading,

Zack Kucharski, Gazette Executive Editor