Ka-boom, but wait …

Wednesday, May 27, 2009

By Matthew Irwin

More than six years ago, Planet Jackson Hole arrived as the valley’s first alternative news source. Many of us are still trying to figure out what “alternative” means in a region of about 20,000 residents and the ubiquitous influence of people on whose desires we can only speculate according to where they spend their money. (If only we could measure tourist’s remorse.)

The “alt” debate has actually caused a devastating geological event in our office – not unlike the earth-shattering explosion that is the fate of the Yellowstone caldera, if you take the point of view of a certain local-ish film.

Now “the Planet” is unlivable for us. The nature of this event is uncertain to us – as uncertain, and as possibly mixed, as the metaphor it might provide for a newspaper, so from the exhaustion of coming up with relevant puns, among other reasons such as “because I said so,” we are leaving “Planet JH” behind for a new life as Jackson Hole Weekly, JH Weekly for short.

Not today, my friends – you’ll still see the word “Planet” in our masthead and we’ll still throw the word around a bit – but one day, you’ll pick up the paper to find out what’s happening around town or to argue with our opinions about what’s happening around town, and the word will be gone.

You may not notice. We hope that by the time we pull “Planet” from our name, you won’t notice. Already, we’ve eliminated the Planet logo from these pages. We couldn’t bring it back if we wanted to, seeing as its been destroyed (see cover).
Speaking of new things, you may notice the rest of the paper has changed as well.
We’ve been planning a redesign for some time, hoping to launch in a couple weeks, but our printer called us last week and for reasons having to do with a new press and old paper said, “Now or never” (never being next year, which is longer than we wanted to wait).

So we had to throw our art director into a well-lit pit with nothing but coffee, energy bars and a basket in which she deposited the new pages. (It puts the logo in the basket.)

We think she’s done a great job, but we also think that she’ll wake up after some rest and say, “What just happened?”

Don’t worry, we always feel this way on Wednesday morning, but this time may be different – I mean, this is our identity, our readability. What I’m trying to say is that we’ll probably be tweaking the paper over the next few weeks, so please forgive our dust, as it were.

What else? We greatly expanded our A&E coverage and added a wine column.
Photos are bigger, and more plentiful, and we even made more room for news.
I get a few more words for this space, as well. 

Oh, we also have more space for letters, and we know that the Comp Plan is out of sight for a while, but we bet you have other things you can write to us about, so please do – a good start might be what you think about the redesign, and how you’re going to have a difficult time thinking of us as Jackson Hole Weekly when the other guys are largely known as “the weekly.”

So, allow me to introduce you to JH Weekly, Jackson Hole’s free independent newspaper. Enjoy. JHW
PERMALINK:
Ka-boom, but wait … | Planet JH News Article: Cover Stories

Leave a Comment