New Sun

Beginning Monday: Anne Arundel County readers of The Sun and Evening Sun will receive dramatically improved newspapers, tailored to meet the needs of county readers. The papers will include a redesigned and expanded local news section. The tabloid-sized Anne Arundel County Sun will be enlarged to full size and will combine coverage of the county and its neighborhoods with news from around the state. The papers also will include local sports coverage, editorials, television listings and classified advertising customized for Anne Arundel readers.

Chris Bohjalian's novel "The Sandcastle Girls" has many traditional elements of compelling fiction - people with secrets, shocking plot twists, compulsively likable characters and a rich love story. It also describes the 1915 mass killing of Armenians - "The Slaughter You Know Next to Nothing About," as one of the characters in his book calls it. Bohjalian, who is at work on his 17th book, was inspired to write this one by the story of his Armenian grandparents. The author will talk about the novel April 22 as part of the new Baltimore Sun Book Club (see details, Page 7)

The above headline appeared in this newspaper on April 6, 1910. It topped an announcement that a new Evening Sun was to be launched as a companion to the morning Sun that had been tossed on doorsteps and hawked from Baltimore street corners for 73 years. Now, 85 years later, we are printing that headline again -- this time to proclaim that a new, improved version of The Sun will appear Sept. 18, three days after the Evening Sun rolls from our presses for the last time.This is a bitter-sweet occasion.

This is the new home of Midnight Sun. The move to a new URL is part of a newsroom-wide switch to a new publishing system. Baltimore Diner has already done it, and so has Z on TV . Eventually, all of the paper's blogs will upgrade as well.  Movable Type was a perfectly good platform, but not the dinosaur one we've been using, which was like blogging with a typewriter. But the benefits of switching over will be imperceptible to readers. For readers, the most obvious change will be the blog's layout, which will be cleaner and more uniform.

The text type used in the new Sun is a customized version of a font known as Ionic No. 5, which was developed in the late 1920s specifically for newspapers and which quickly became one of the most popular in America.The typeface first appeared in the Evening News of Newark, N.J., in 1926. Within 18 months of its introduction, more than 3,000 newspapers across the country were using Ionic No. 5 for their text.One reason this type is so popular, beyond its classic look, is that it is all but impossible to reproduce badly.

In Washington these days, "Bush-Cheney" bumper stickers on cars with Texas license plates may be multiplying like mad. But back in the Lone Star State, the bumper sticker of the moment reflects a different demographic trend. It reads, "I wasn't born in Texas, but I got here as fast as I could." After a close look at the first wave of numbers from the 2000 census, demographers have concluded that a dramatic population increase in Texas since 1990 is at least partly the result of people moving from other parts of the country in search of an easier lifestyle, a lower cost of living and a more hospitable climate.

Beginning Monday: Carroll readers of The Sun and Evening Sun will receive dramatically improved newspapers, tailored to meet the needs of county readers. The papers will include a redesigned and expanded local news section. The tabloid-sized Carroll County Sun will be enlarged to full size and will combine coverage of the county and its neighborhoods with news from around the state. The papers also will include local sports coverage, editorials, television listings and classified advertising customized for Carroll County readers.

As long as I've been writing restaurant criticism, first as a freelancer for the City Paper and later for The Baltimore Sun, people have always been curious about my qualifications. Some of them were actually nice about it. Now that I'm The Sun's restaurant critic, I expect those questions to continue, and I know, too, that there are assumptions about the background of a restaurant critic. In my case, those assumptions are seldom correct. First, I was not the kind of kid who spent numberless days in my mother's kitchen, learning how to worry a sauce, roll out dough, or discern baking apples from snacking apples.

Richard Gorelick, a freelance writer known for his witty and insightful prose style, has been named The Baltimore Sun's new restaurant critic. When Gorelick joins the paper Monday, his duties will include reviewing the area's impressive array of restaurants and operating the Sun's successful food blog. Dining at Large was started by former restaurant critic Elizabeth Large, who retired in February after 37 years on the beat. "Richard will do a great job," Large said. "His reviews are very knowledgeable and fun to read.

I think the new Baltimore Sun is very nice, very informative, very colorful. It will take me a while to get accustomed to where my favorite sections and features are. But the search is worthwhile. Keep up the great service. Marge Griffith, Pasadena I am deeply disheartened by the new format of the once-venerable Baltimore Sun. As a former newspaper reporter and long-time professor of journalism, I have lived through many of the changes major newspapers suffer: pressure to close foreign bureaus, pressure to shorten stories and pressure to mimic television by elevating celebrity news (and newscasters)

Unionized employees in The Sun's newsroom, advertising and other departments overwhelmingly approved a new four-year contract last night, averting the possibility of a strike at a time the paper is coping with declining revenue and increased competition. Representatives from management and the Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild struck a tentative agreement early yesterday on a contract covering about 480 employees. The deal was contingent on union members ratifying it last night. They did so on a voice vote.

Newly hired Sun columnist Wendi C. Thomas, whose first piece in the paper was to have run today, decided over the weekend to return to her former employer, The Commercial Appeal in Memphis, Tenn. Thomas, 34, said her decision was motivated entirely by homesickness for Memphis, where she spent much of her childhood. "This doesn't have anything to do with The Sun, or the staff there, or my editors," Thomas said. "The Sun is a very high-caliber paper. I've never worked at a paper like this.

DEAR READERS, Welcome to a new day in The Sun. After nearly a year of work and a lot of listening to our readers, we're unveiling the first redesign of The Sun in a decade. As you can see, the new Sun has bigger, bolder type that's easier to read. And the new Sun is brighter, with more color to enliven your reading and make it easier to find your favorite parts of the newspaper. Bigger type and more color are only two of the changes in your new Sun. We've added a new weekly section on Wednesday called Varsity, which significantly expands our coverage of local high school sports.

Denise E. Palmer, president and chief executive officer of a 24-hour cable news station in Chicago, will become publisher of The Sun in September, the newspaper said yesterday. Palmer will replace Michael E. Waller, 60, who will retire in January after running the paper since October 1997. Palmer, 45, is scheduled to join The Sun on Sept. 23 and work with Waller, who has been named chairman, until his departure. She will become the 15th publisher in the history of the 165-year-old newspaper, which has won the Pulitzer Prize 14 times and was started in 1837 by Arunah S. Abell, a journeyman printer who sold the then-tabloid for a penny.

In Washington these days, "Bush-Cheney" bumper stickers on cars with Texas license plates may be multiplying like mad. But back in the Lone Star State, the bumper sticker of the moment reflects a different demographic trend. It reads, "I wasn't born in Texas, but I got here as fast as I could." After a close look at the first wave of numbers from the 2000 census, demographers have concluded that a dramatic population increase in Texas since 1990 is at least partly the result of people moving from other parts of the country in search of an easier lifestyle, a lower cost of living and a more hospitable climate.