Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes!

So wow, today's kind of a big day. First, all those fucking college students are back. Second, by my count it's the 12th which means we should finally have a clear picture as to what the fuck myRecord is supposed to be. Everybody turn to B4 now to follow al...hey, wait a minute. The LENS section isn't the B secti...OMG! It's Record redesign day!

That's right, following in the tradition of last year's reorg that banished Lori Gilbert to the LENS pages and caused Mike Fitzgerald to lament the death of journalism at the hands of the pesky internet and all it's newfangled Web 2.0 features (and the redesign the year before that which brought us the 3MR and LENS section), the Record has once again freaked out at the budget numbers (Damn you El Guapo!) and made a radical change. Don't you just love journalism?

We're going to reserve judgement for later in the week. Our knee-jerk reaction is that the Record now looks more like the Lodi News-Sentinel or the Manteca Bulletin than an actual newspaper. What's the next step? Going alternating days Tracy Press style?

See, that's the natural reaction for everybody. But if some of the spin Klocke and the Cooze threw out there in their announcement on the front page today (but nowhere on Recordnet.com. The more things change, the more they stay the same) (Update! (1:30): I was working on the Quick Links and saw they finally posted the announcement. It's dated 1:12 pm. Just an hour after this post. Hi guys!) is true, then it can't be all bad. The Record's badly needed a focus on Local news instead of the AP stories they've been printing for a while now. Although I am disappointed that the section in most need of eliminating (the Sports pages, natch) somehow survived relatively unchanged.

One last thing before we get back to our regularly scheduled programming. What kind of taskmasters run the Record? We make fun of them for their lack of original reporting but we weren't joking when we said today was busy. First there's this redesign. Then Mike Klocke warns us in his Sunday column that the Record's going to have an insane amount of coverage of the 20th anniversary of the Cleveland School shootings. On top of that myRecord officially launches today. All of this within a month of the Record sustaining staffing losses that they apparently don't intend on refilling. (What? You don't read the copy editor's blog?)

Wow, way to stagger this shit out guys. At this rate Frankie Bozem's head is going to explode in April. If you see an exhausted Record staffer, now you know why. Buy them a beer or something. And then tell them the new redesign sucks.