What happened to my 17.5 by 11.5 inch newspaper? What happened to El Estoque?

Let me try to answer.

As a staff, the feeling of news magazine style has been trailing us for years. Before this year, our staff was split up into a separate online and print staff. A large part of that was that last year was the first year, I feel, we truly mastered that idea of “breaking news” online. This success in one medium inherently brought about some conflict with the other.

“No, that can’t go on online. We are writing about it in print.”
That line that El Estoque reporters often tossed around in our newsroom seemed backward to me. It didn’t make sense to compete over content. To avoid that conflict, the challenge for the print staff was to shift gears while looking at their coverage. As our online site evolved, we simultaneously revamped print content into the freestyle, dynamic magazine dimension that our genre of newspaper irritatingly omitted. Our content behaved in a reflective, analytical manner (as any monthly publication should) while the straight-news, immediate reporting was now being allotted to the online medium.

After this growth, our flow of information in print conveyed all characteristics of a magazine and “newspaper” simply no longer fit our personality.

Over the years, this disguise has gradually increased in intensity — to the point where the debate about news magazine versus newspaper was passed down to each new staff. When it came to ours, we made the decision.

To create this letter and answer your question though, I wanted to put this decision in some retrospective. I wanted to know what types of change El Estoque has taken on in the past 42 years and its comparison to ours.

As I rummaged through the dusty crevasses of Room A111, I saw the metamorphoisis this publication undertook since the days of typewriters and 10 special fonts per page. Those folks probably didn’t think their paper had to change, that the awkwardly-lit photos and unbelievably confusing formatting that I laughed at would soon become obsolete and grossly outdated. Forty two years later, changing our name from paper to magazine seems trivial.

Soon enough, the newspaper form from 2010 – 2011 will soon blend in with the forms from the 70s, 80s, and 90s — labeled as archaic, vintage.

And someday, a new staff will amend what we consider the cutting-edge style of today. They will make a decision that their audience will inquire about. Then their Editor-in-Chief will answer.

But in the meantime, we hope you enjoy the fresh look of El Estoque.