East Texas

Tuesday’s edition of your morning paper will be narrower. This is in response to skyrocketing newsprint costs, said Nelson Clyde IV, publisher of the Tyler Morning Telegraph.

“Reducing the width of the newspaper is an evolving trend taking place at newspapers across the country,” Clyde said.

“Rising commodity prices have affected every business in this country,” he said. “The cost of newsprint is second only to labor at the Tyler Paper, and newsprint prices are projected to rise more than $600,000 this year.”

“This reduction in the width of our product will help us recapture about a fourth of those expenses,” Clyde said. “We will address the remainder of our rising costs through operational efficiencies.”

“We faced a similar spike in newsprint prices in 1995 when we discontinued the publication of the evening newspaper, the Tyler Courier-Times,” he said. “We face a steeper increase in newsprint prices than in 1995. However, we believe we can continue to offer the most robust news and advertising product in the region with our newspapers and our Web site.”

A.J. “Jim” Giametta, executive editor, stressed that the size of type used in the Tyler Paper’s news stories will not change. ”It will be the same as before,” he said. “While other papers are shrinking their type size along with their page width, we are not.”

Repackaging of the Tuesday-Saturday stock tables and a redesign of the Sunday comic pages, which keeps all current content and comic strips but fits them into the narrower width format, is the result of six months of planning and review by top managers.