Welcome to the new Warren County Record!Regular readers of this newspaper will notice that this edition looks different than last week’s paper.That’s because our newspaper has undergone a redesign — our first major one since shortly after The Missourian Media Co. acquired the newspaper in 2001.The masthead, the fonts, the section headers and many other aspects of the newspaper’s basic design have all been updated to give The Record a more fresh, contemporary look and, hopefully, a better experience for our readers.As newspaper redesigns go, this one is mostly aesthetic in nature and fairly benign. The same content and features that appear regularly in the paper are still here — things like coverage of local government, profiles of county residents, obituaries and public notices. Longtime readers will, we hope, quickly find themselves on familiar ground.More important, our focus and commitment on covering local news, sports and issues that matter to Warren County residents remains unchanged. Our core, indeed our heritage, is local news, always has been and always will be.Though the paper has a different look, our foundation remains the same. Our objective is still to cover Warren County better than anyone else.So why the change?The timing was right. We wanted a more modern look. We’ve felt for years that the paper needed a more visually striking design — one that would be more appealing to our readers, but we never got around to it.To be sure, we’ve tweaked the paper’s front page design over the years most notably in 2005, 2009 and again in April of last year. But we felt now was the time for a comprehensive makeover given the changes our paper has made, including the recent launch of our website warrencountyrecord.com which allows us to provide our readers with news and updates 24 hours a day, seven days a week.The Warren County Record is no longer just a once-a-week newspaper. Our new masthead reinforces this fact. If you haven’t checked out our website, you should. We have started to integrate more comprehensive multimedia to our website, including video reports. Some of our video reports have been picked up by national media outlets and gone viral.Our ultimate goal is for our readers to make our online edition their home page on their computer or tablet. It is a great source for breaking news and we have already registered as many as 14,000 page views on a single story.We encourage you to go online and experience our content in a brand new way. There are other exciting developments planned for 2014, including an enhanced version of our mobile experience.Our goal with the redesign is for the front page to grab your attention in a way it never has before. Another goal is better packaging of stories and photographs.Our redesign is a work in progress. There will be more updates and changes in the weeks ahead as we implement other design changes and refine the design.We appreciate the fact that some of our readers won’t like the new design. That’s fairly typical as far as newspaper redesigns go. Let’s face it, some people just don’t like change. We are creatures of habit and we don’t like our routines altered. Count us among that group. We understand that you can’t please everyone.We also understand readers read newspapers for their content. They don’t look at them for flashy design. But it has been over a decade since we’ve updated the look of our newspaper and we feel that it’s time for a fresh, vibrant look.We welcome your thoughts and input on our redesign. You can weigh in by taking our weekly poll which can be found HERE.Finally, in making the decision to move forward with the design we were guided by an observation from one of our country’s most innovative newspaper publishers, Benjamin Franklin, who once said: “All mankind is divided into three classes: Those that are immovable, those that are movable, and those that move.”We are moving forward. Thank you for your support. Thank you for reading The Record.

The Warren County Record debuted a redesigned layout today January 2, 2014.

Admin