Editorial: Welcome to our new look

The big day has finally arrived.

Your favourite newspaper, Hawke's Bay Today, is now compact from Monday to Friday.

It has been months in the planning and there has been a lot of hard work by many people.

And the result? Judge for yourself, but we think it is very good.

This is the biggest change to Hawke's Bay Today since we moved from afternoon delivery to a morning paper. International and national trends show that readers prefer the smaller, easy-to-read compact size.

Our own reader surveys back this up and the feedback we received from you has been positive. What I have enjoyed the most during the last few months is that everyone is talking about the change. People always mention it to me and say they are looking forward to it.

Well, the change has happened and I am sure you are loving it. The one thing that has not changed is our commitment to local news. You will notice in today's paper that there is more local content than ever before.

We have more local news pages up front and have added a special Monday feature called Spotlight (P8-9), where we will focus on a particular issue each week. We now have three opinion pages, which will have a daily columnist - today it is deputy editor Mark Story (on this page) - and a Hot Topic column (P11), written today by Sport Hawke's Bay chief executive Colin Stone. Our third opinion page (P12) is called Chatterbox and is a readers' forum telling you what is hot online.

If you are a sports fan, there is a special sport liftout section from P13 for you to enjoy. It includes an exciting new feature, a school sports page.

So there it is - the new Hawke's Bay Today. Let me know what you think at editor@hbtoday.co.nz.