March 16, 2011
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Washington Times relaunching Monday
The Washington Times will be bringing back its sports, metro and life sections Monday as part of a wider, redesigned paper with twice the pages, according to managing editor Chris Dolan.
The redesign was carried out by designers who have worked for the paper in the past, and so won’t startle longtime readers.
“It’s a cleanup, more than anything,” Dolan said.”There is some redesign, but it’s more going back to the wider version of the paper to make it more readable and better for layouts.”
The paper has already hired roughly 30 new employees to fill the more robust layout, and plans to ultimately hire between 40 and 45, Dolan said. Mike Harris, previously an editor at CBS Sports and AOL FanHouse, and sports editor of The Richmond News Leader and The Richmond Times-Dispatch, was named sports editor last month.
The relaunch comes nearly five months after the paper was sold to a buyers group made up of many members of the paper’s old guard who had been ousted in tumultuous year of fighting among the heirs of the paper’s founder, Rev. Sun Myung Moon.
The new owners, led by longtime Washington Times executives Douglas Dong Moon Joo, Tom McDevitt and Keith Cooperrider, were expected to bring back the paper’s subsidy from the Unification Church, reportedly around $40 million in 2009. When the funding was cut off amid fighting that year, the paper was forced to shed sections and much of its staff.
The paper is still on the hunt for a new executive editor, a job that Dolan said he has not applied for. The former executive editor, Sam Dealey, left the paper shortly after the sale went through last November.
