For starters, and just for the summer, we are trimming our publication schedule from six days a week to four. You’ll receive the Daily Report in your email inbox on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, along with UVA Today Weekend on Saturday mornings.
Second, we’re going to tweak how we present our headlines. For years, we uppercased most words in a headline, for example: Summer Interns Are Ready To Work. In publishing terms, that style is called “title case.” The New York Times and Wall Street Journal use title case.
But that style is at odds with most online news outlets like UVA Today. Starting Monday, we’ll capitalize the first word of a headline and proper nouns, a style called “sentence case.” Headlines in The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times are sentence case. We believe that will make the headlines easier to read.
Finally, we’re hoping to W.O.W. you with a new feature.
Two years ago, we launched UVA Today Weekend, a wrap-up of the week’s best stories plus a fresh feature delving deeper into an interesting subject. The idea was that Saturday and Sunday readers might have a little more time to enjoy a substantial feature story.
Those Weekend feature stories became the most popular articles of the week, gaining at least twice the readership of a weekday story. Often much more.
At the same time, we realize not everyone’s Saturday is open to leisure reading. So, in case you missed the Weekend feature, we’ll republish it on Wednesdays, calling it a “W.O.W.,” or a Weekend on Wednesday.
For the summer, we’ll republish some of the academic year’s most popular UVA Today Weekend features. Next fall, we’ll switch to a format where the W.O.W. is the previous Weekend story.
UVA Today will return to its regular six-day-a-week schedule the first full week of August.
