The Richmond and Twickenham Times has gone tabloid and full-colour in a major redesign of the Newsquest-owned paper in west London.
After months of planning the new-look, 80-page Times goes on sale today, alongwith its sister titles in the Hounslow and Brentford series.
Editor Scott Barr said: ‘This new size is a milestone in our history and, we really believe, is a remarkable achievement considering the challenges presented in moving from the broadsheet size to a tabloid.
A big effect on the paper’s reporters will be stricter limits of story length, according to Barr. ‘A story making a full column in the broadsheet could only be given half that space in the tabloid,’he said.
‘Some of us had already had experience of writing tight to get it right, but the others have had to adapt quickly to the new rules.”
He stressed that during the planning stages, ‘every aspect’of the old paper was retained to please regular readers.
The paper has struggled to maintain a healthy sales figure in recent years.
Its average weekly circulation figure according to September’s ABC figures was 11,073, down 17.3 per cent year-on-year, though its performance had improved slightly.
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