It was nice to see my old friend The Wall Street Journal upon returning to work today.

"You look good," I said at first sight. "Have you lost weight?"

Actually, it's been well-known since late last year that the WSJ -- perhaps the single most influential publication for U.S. business communicators -- was undergoing a major redesign. And redesigned it has been.

The new Journal is now 12 inches wide (according to my ruler) instead of 15, which is a reduction of 20%!

With this shrinkage, the Journal announced a host of new features, many of them found at its online site. These include a new Markets Data Center, new blogs, podcasts, videos, and readers' forums. There are other improvements for the print Journal as well.

For those of us in communications, this means more outlets for news -- and, thus, more hunger for stories. While print space appears to be shrinking, there's additional space created online via the WSJ's new blogs, podcasts and video.

Overall, I like many of the changes, though the narrower paper will take some getting used to.

The only part of this I really don't care for is how the redesign was communicated. It seems way over the top. Here's an excerpt from the Publisher's Letter in today's paper:

For over a century, The Wall Street Journal has been an icon in business, markets and journalism. In a time of change, those of us entrusted with icons face a dilemma: Do we preserve the icon as it has been, rejecting change as too risky? Or do we try to add to the qualities that created the icon in the first place, taking care not to change simply for the sake of change?

We embrace the latter approach, driven by the knowledge that your needs are constantly changing and that the Journal has constantly evolved, each time emerging more vital to more readers. This Readers' Guide highlights why we've changed what we've changed -- and that what doesn't change is at least as important as what does.

The impetus is the great change in recent years in how you get news and information. You now get updated throughout the day from many different sources, print and online. Readers told us that the Journal could better tailor its efforts to how, when and where you access news. We've rethought the role of a newspaper as well as what you seek online. Your expectations of media have shifted, making this an era when you expect us to embrace change.

Only further down does the story get to the narrowed size of the paper:

Many of the changes today are very noticeable. We've reduced the width of the newspaper. The almost unanimous reaction among readers in focus groups was that this would make the newspaper more convenient and literally handier. (Also, we'd rather invest in newspeople than in newsprint.) I hope you'll agree that our new typeface is more readable and that page one is still very much our own unique page one.

OK, I thought as I read this. Here's the story. It doesn't take a newspaper industry analyst to understand that reducing the physical width of a newspaper by 20% will result in significant newsprint savings -- huge numbers for a paper with the readership of the Journal. It is also no secret that newspapers are under tremendous pressure from reduced ad dollars and online competition, and badly need every penny they can find.

So, is this "redesign" really just a cost-savings effort with the rest thrown in to spin the news?

I actually don't think so. I believe it is both at once. The cost savings motivation is certainly real, and probably primary. And the new features the Journal has developed are also real -- and quite exciting.

My complaint is that by not being more direct about the obvious cost-savings reasons for this -- and what WSJ reader wouldn't understand and sympathize with the need to be competitive and watch expenses? -- the Journal has undermined its own good news and put its credibility at risk. I'm shocked such a great news organization would fall into this trap.

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