Under Abrams' prodding, Tribune papers generally have opted for smaller page sizes, larger photographs, fewer front-page stories, and more clearly compartmentalized content. The Baltimore Sun—the name is new, changed from the Sun—now has a dedicated Crime & Courts page, as do most of the other seven redesigned Tribune papers, in Los Angeles, Chicago, Hartford, Connecticut, and elsewhere.

The Web's influence on the redesigns is obvious. But Abrams says he also admires foreign newspapers like the Guardian, a London-based daily he calls "intelligent but unconventional," as well as Mexico City's "visually stunning" Excélsior, the Wall Street Journal ("because of how well-defined they are"), and USA Today ("very easy to read").

The back-to-the-future Tribune approach also draws on what Abrams defines as the Golden Age of newspapers, from the 1920s to 1960s.

In recent years, "many newspapers have been on autopilot," Abrams says. "I thought we really had to work on reclaiming things that newspapers had traditionally owned," from investigative reporting to election and crime coverage.

Even as he extols such labor-intensive endeavors, though, Tribune has continued reducing its payroll—shedding 75 newsroom jobs in the most recent cutbacks at the Los Angeles Times and leaving the editorial staff about half its size in 2001. It also announced the consolidation of all Tribune-owned newspapers' Washington bureaus into one super-bureau, with significant reductions in reporters and editors.

In a recent column in the trade magazine Editor & Publisher, Steve Outing argued that print redesigns should be aimed at retaining core, older readers, while also directing them to newspaper websites. He noted that the thinning of newspaper content has turned off many devoted newspaper readers without attracting new ones.

Charlotte Hall, editor of the Orlando Sentinel since 2004, says the Sentinel redesign is geared primarily at "people in their 30s and people in their 40s," whom she calls "key demographics for us in the future."

Launched in late June, the redesigned paper tries "to be more personal and more emotional," says Hall. "That means a hotter look overall, it means bolder headlines, playing your columnists up big, encouraging your writers to write in different ways, making news more accessible."

Veteran newspaper analyst John Morton says that Tribune is "trying to make the front pages of newspapers look like commercial radio"—in other words, "flashy, edgy, abrupt." It is possible, he says, that the designs will help attract "young people" with "short attention spans."

But there is as yet no evidence that this is happening. Weitman says the Sentinel has several hundred fewer subscribers now than it did before its redesign. Another Tribune newspaper, the Fort Lauderdale-based Sun Sentinel, has lost even more subscribers since its makeover in August.

"We can't find any impact from the redesign," says Norbert Ortiz, the Sentinel's vice president for circulation and consumer marketing. He adds that it could take six to nine months to gauge the redesign's effects.

In Chicago, where "your new Tribune" was introduced September 29, the Tribune's new editor, Gerould Kern, says he sees "opportunities with people in their 30s and 40s" as the newspaper becomes more "locally relevant" and "personally useful."

"We wanted people to care about the paper...because they found compelling storytelling, found themselves reflected in it, and saw stories about subjects they cared about," Kern says. The Tribune now devotes pages 2 and 3 to "The Talk," which touches on topics—such as the Tina Fey-Sarah Palin skits on Saturday Night Live—designed to reflect or spur water-cooler conversation.

Kern says that anecdotal evidence suggests that "younger readers almost universally liked the new approach." About 0.2 percent of subscribers canceled in the wake of the redesign, less than normal circulation churn, he says.

Doctor, a former managing editor of the St. Paul Pioneer Press in Minnesota, says that the Tribune redesigns— "bolder, more colorful, more sidebars, more useful, fewer jumps"—represent "really good newspaper print ideas of the 1980s." In the digital age, he says, "they're not going to drive a lot of new readership."

But Alan Jacobson of Brass Tacks Design, another critic of the Tribune effort, argues that done right, redesign can boost both circulation and advertising revenue—and that results are usually quick. He cites his own successes at smaller papers in Cheyenne, Wyoming; Waterbury, Connecticut; and Duluth, Minnesota.

The redesigned Tribune papers are "prettier" than before, Jacobson says. But the design prototypes suggest no significant changes in content, he says. "I wouldn't call it redesign. I would call it redecoration," he says.

The redesign process has sparked a cycle of emotions within Tribune newsrooms, Abrams says, from fear to acceptance to excitement. (Abrams' own "think piece" memos, with their misspelled words and seeming naiveté about such matters as foreign correspondents, may have increased the anxiety.)

Journalists worry—unduly, Abrams says—that "any kind of change means you're going to dumb it down, or any graphics means you're going to emulate USA Today, or any significant change is instantly going to upset 50 percent of readers."

In fact, Weitman says, the readership response has been relatively muted. And some analysts say that at this point any experimentation in newsrooms is welcome.

"People's perceptions of how news is presented have changed because of the Web," says Mark Potts, an internet and media consultant who now blogs at RecoveringJournalist.com. "Doing things with smaller bytes and bigger headlines and more entry points and a little more clarity is a good thing. It's making it easier for a generation that's now Web-savvy to relate to what's going on in print."

While change is not always guaranteed to work, "staying the same hurts," Potts says. "We know that."