Embracing change: Uptown gets new look

Headline-makers come and go. After all, news is always happening, especially in a world running at a digital pace.

But there remain a few headline-makers who stand the test of time, who haven't faded and who still resonate. And while he now walks with a limp and doesn't look as strong as when he stood atop the Kremlin, Mikhail Gorbachev has never lost his star power.

You could see that in the way the 81-year-old commanded the attention of a premier, a mayor and the city's business elite. And you could hear it in the silence of a packed MTS Centre as the standing-room-only crowd of teens at We Day hung on every word from a man who changed the world they live in long before they were born.

Over the years, Gorbachev has made headlines 3,938 times in the Free Press. The first was in February 1982 in a story about Politburo rivals jockeying for power.

"By all accounts, the brightest, best-educated, most personable and healthiest man in the Politburo is also the youngest: Mikhail Gorbachev, 50," is how we first introduced him to our readers.

And it was a great honour to reintroduce Gorbachev this week when he took over our reins as guest editor.

It was a first for our paper, but then again, Gorbachev was always about firsts as he had the courage and the conviction to see things differently, to embody perestroika and glasnost, to lead change that changed the world order.

In that spirit of change, we changed up your paper this week.

First, we not only allowed Gorbachev to return to our front page with a personal message, but also sprinkled Tuesday's paper with stories reflecting the editorial themes he had laid out for our newsroom.

Then, we went bigger than we ever had with a front page capturing all the energy, the excitement and the engagement of We Day. The result was Wednesday's full-colour, four-page commemorative edition.

Finally today, we relaunch Uptown as a Free Press product after 690 issues as a tabloid, which most recently had been a weekly produced by our sister publication, Canstar Community News.

Our Uptown takes all that we had been offering in The Tab and our Thursday Arts & Life section and marries them into the one guide you need to navigate the city's arts and entertainment scene. We've added the always popular Dining Out column by Marion Warhaft. And we are also introducing a new voice and perspective via a column by Wab Kinew, whose connections range from native hip hop to broadcasting to his new role as the University of Winnipeg's director of indigenous inclusion.

We hope Uptown is a change that not only gives longtime readers what they have long expected in their Thursday Free Press but also explores what the youth attracted to We Day need when they go out on the town. In other words, Uptown will be for tastes both highbrow and lowbrow -- and everything in between.

I don't want to equate a different approach to building a front page or the launch of a new entertainment guide with tearing down the Berlin Wall or signing a nuclear disarmament treaty.

But in a world that is always changing, a newspaper can't be afraid of change, of trying to do things differently, even colouring outside the lines once in a while.

We hope you enjoy these changes and the ones still to come at the Free Press.

paul.samyn@freepress.mb.ca Twitter: @paulsamyn

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