AUCKLAND, Friday: Stuff’s national Sunday newspaper The Sunday Star-Times – a broadsheet since its inception in 1994 – is to adopt a compact format in three weeks, on Sunday 21 October, following the lead set by all other Stuff dailies which switched to compact earlier this year.
The new format will also feature a design and content makeover. “We’ve talked to our readers and we can confirm we are keeping all their favourite parts of the paper, like the Sunday magazine, Focus and Escape sections,” said Stuff ceo Sinead Boucher, in a statement.
“Going compact gives us a chance to re-imagine the paper and magazine offerings with a fresh elegant design and new content and columnists,” she said.
“So the Sunday magazine is getting a design update, and we are adding new columnists to our line-up to showcase even more New Zealand voices, such as ‘how to Dad’ Jordan Watson, senior business journalist Hamish Rutherford, and other new food, tech and sports writers. We will continue providing our readers with an absorbing, fresh approach to high quality journalism and presentation.”
“The campaign includes a media schedule of $2m and will run for seven weeks.”
Stuff recently hosted both reader and advertising agency focus groups, where a mocked-up prototype of the new-look paper was shared around for feedback. Using the readers’ “invaluable” input, Stuff will now tweak the paper based on these discussions before the refreshed Sunday Star-Times is rolled out in October.
The Sunday Star-Times has a weekly audience of more than 250,000 readers and with a mix of lifestyle, political, travel, sport and entertainment content covered, the paper is a fixture for many people’s weekend, and we are looking to continue growing that audience.
The statement said: “The move to compact will also be supported with a significant marketing campaign – where anyone who buys the new look Sunday Star-Times can go in the draw to win hundreds of prizes, including a cruise worth $10K.
“The campaign includes a media schedule of over $2m in spend to promote the new format to our readers, this will run for seven weeks to ensure we have a maximum engagement with our audiences through this change in format and design.”
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