the 941

It’s not just your imagination: The paper you’ll see on stands tomorrow is a bit smaller.

I had prepared a whole bevy of “shrinkage” jokes to run at you this week — along the lines of “Creative Loafing just jumped out of the pool!” — but let’s just stick with the facts. If you’ve picked up our paper before, you’ll notice this week’s issue will feel a bit different. That’s because we’ve gone from our traditional 10-by-11.5-inch size, which suited us just fine since the days of the Weekly Planet, to the new industry standard, 10 inches by 10.

The company that prints our paper, The Herald Tribune Media Group, made the decision to trim everything it prints by an inch and a half for reasons that are not all that complex: It wants to save money. In a piece published in the Sarasota Herald-Tribune this past Sunday, Publisher Diane McFarlin says the move will save the company hundreds of thousands of dollars. “That, in turn,” she writes, “will enable us to preserve content, jobs and services, while holding down costs to readers and advertisers.”

The Herald-Tribune is hardly alone in its choice to go square, and it’s affecting alternative papers like ours all around the country. Our big brother publication up in Tampa, in fact, resized its publication weeks ago.

But you don’t care about that; what you want to know is: How is this going to affect my beloved/behated editorial content?

Well, I’ve got good news on that front. It’s not going to. Sure, we may have to be extra ruthless with the red pen, making sure every sentence deserves to make the cut, but we’re not slashing any of our regular features or columns, and my guess is you won’t even be able to tell a difference.

But it’s true we’re not as long as we used to be, and this week, at least, it kind of feels like we’re free-balling it at an ice hockey game. Sorry, couldn’t resist.

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