The Loughborough Echo has undergone a major redesign this week and revived the 117-year-old title’s original masthead.
The Trinity Mirror-owned paid-for weekly, which serves the Charnwood area of Leicestershire, has reverted to its original Gothic style masthead, abandoning one designed in the early 1980s.
Editor Andy Rush – who is only the fourth Echo editor in its history – said: ‘People are always surprised when they hear just how few editors there have been at the Echo since 1891.
‘And when we investigated the possibility of a change to our banner, I was equally surprised that we’d only used three different font types before our new one.
‘It’s a bright, busy and modern look, but it retains a traditional feel – with no sacrifices made to the number of stories we offer our readers.’
Tony Lennox, editorial director of Trinity Mirror’s weekly newspapers in the Midlands, said: ‘The Echo redesigned its masthead in the early eighties, abandoning the old Gothic style which had served the paper so well over the years.
‘It was a very fashionable design for the eighties, but it hasn’t aged well. It was the newspaper equivalent of flares, flowery shirt and a Kevin Keegan perm. No-one’s going to miss it.’
This week’s Echo contains a 12-page nostalgia supplement titled ‘Looking back, going forward”, comparing the paper’s different looks over the last century.
The Loughborough Echo is a paid-for weekly with a circulation of 21,438, according to ABC.
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