Apr 10, 2002 By Seth Sutel Ap Business Writer 2 min read

NEW YORK (AP) – There’s something new on the front page of Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal: color. There’s also a lighter layout with more open space, more graphics, and guides to articles featured elsewhere in the paper as well as on the newspaper’s Web site.

The redesign is the culmination of a four-year, $225 million upgrade to the Journal’s printing facilities nationwide that greatly expanded its ability to use color. It was the first major overhaul the paper has had since 1942, when its distinctive six-column front page was put in place.

“The Wall Street Journal has reported on other people’s news since 1889,” the newspaper’s editors wrote in a front-page story. “Today, we have some of our own.”

Executives at Dow Jones & Co., which publishes the Journal, have said the goal of the revamp was to give the paper a more modern look and feel and to make it easier to read.

To that end, the first edition to use the new design made generous use of color graphics on the front pages of the different sections, and guides to articles inside.

“For people who’ve always found The Wall Street Journal a bit forbidding, who considered its look authoritative but perhaps also a bit authoritarian, I hope we’ve made the publication somewhat more approachable, more appealing,” the paper’s publisher, Peter Kann, wrote in a letter to readers.

The redesign also features a new section called Personal Journal that will appear Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays with stories on health, family, cars, and other topics that directly affect readers’ lives.

One tradition that was not brought back, however, was an early practice of running editorials on the front page, a fact that was duly noted in an editorial that ran in Tuesday’s editions:

“The first Journal editorial ran on Page One in 1902, making these columns 100 years old, but somehow the designers preferred not to revive that tradition.”

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On the Net:

http://www.wsj.com