Welcome to the new Sun

Today the Las Vegas Sun section in your Sunday paper appears for the first time in our new design. We hope you will find it more attractive, more lively and easier to read than our previous look.

Tomorrow, when the Sun prints a complete afternoon edition, you will find not only an entire paper in our new design but also a great many changes to the content of the paper and to the way it is organized.

All are intended to enhance and improve the experience you have when you read the Sun.

One aspect of the Sun that will not change is that it will continue to be an intensely local newspaper -- the daily paper that readers will need both to find out what is happening in Las Vegas and to understand what the day's news means to their lives in our rapidly growing valley.

Despite a popular misconception, the Sun is not a part of the Review-Journal. It is a separate newspaper, owned locally by the Greenspun family since the late Hank Greenspun bought it in l950. Hank Greenspun's wife, Barbara Greenspun, is the Sun's publisher.

Under a contractual arrangement the Review-Journal handles the advertising, circulation and production functions of the Sun, which frees Sun employees to concentrate wholly on gathering and interpreting the news for its readers.

The Sun provides Las Vegas with an increasingly rare benefit in an age of cities with just one newspaper: a second, locally owned news and editorial voice providing different views and, very often, different stories (a result of serious, and healthy, newsroom competition between the Sun and the Review-Journal).

The Sun publishes complete, independent newspapers Monday through Friday. On Saturday two pages of Sun news and comics appear in the Review-Journal and on Sunday a six-page Sun news and editorial section appears in the Review-Journal. While on these two days Sun material appears in the Review-Journal, it is produced by the Sun editorial department.

All of this will continue, but with a different look.

Besides the new and, we believe, more easy to read type fonts, readers no doubt will quickly notice a major change to the front page of the Sun, starting tomorrow. Where I Stand, a column of opinion introduced by Hank Greenspun in 1950, is moving from the Sun's front page to the "op-ed" page, or the page of opinion opposite the Sun's editorial page.

Where I Stand will continue to be written largely by Brian Greenspun, president and editor of the Sun and Hank Greenspun's older son, and Mike O'Callaghan, chairman of the board and executive editor of the Sun. It will appear four times a week, on Sunday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday.

Ruthe Deskin, assistant to the publisher of the Sun, who has written Where I Stand once a week since l954, will instead write a new column for the Sun, which will appear on the front page of the Accent section on Thursdays.

In this column Deskin will bring her piercing intelligence and gentle humor to bear on events from the perspective of a senior citizen who has watched Las Vegas grow from a dot on the map to the metropolis it is today.

The editorial and op-ed pages will remain on pages 2 and 3 of our Sunday section. Monday through Friday, beginning tomorrow, they will be found on the inside back two pages of the A section. Previously they were in the B section.

This is part of a major transposition of the content of the A and B sections of the Sun.

To reflect the Sun's emphasis on local news, the front page (page A1) will be made up of the most important local news stories each day. You will find national and international news on A1 only when events are so compelling as to warrant front-page treatment.

The World & Nation section of the Sun will begin on page A3 and the remainder of the A section, except for the continuations, or "jumps," of the A1 local stories, will contain national and international news.

Rounding out the A section are the weather news and maps, which will be anchored every day on page A2, and the lottery results, which also will be on page A2.

The B section will now be a local Metro news section. Page B1 will be a second front page for local news, reinforcing the Sun's commitment to be your local newspaper.

The other significant change to the B section is that obituaries and death notices, which used to appear on page B2, will now appear on the inside back page of the B section.

Sun staffer Jeff German's must-read column on the inside workings of Las Vegas will move during the week from page A3 to the Metro section. On Sunday he will continue to appear on the op-ed page as will Sandy Thompson, vice president and asssociate editor of the Sun, whose "Family Matters" column deals with the issues of children and parents in education and Family Court, and how institutions and government agencies meet their needs.

The Business section will be a separate, stand-alone section every day.

The Sun has doubled the staff of the Business section in the last year and further staff expansion is planned. We are committed to bringing you the most comprehensive and most useful business coverage in Las Vegas, and will continue to add to the Business section over time.

Beginning in the Sun tomorrow you will find increased coverage of the gaming industry every day on page 3 of the Business section and an expanded stock list that will include more local stocks and more gaming stocks.

The Sun's outstanding Sports section will add an expanded betting line featuring daily odds as well as NFL, NBA, NHL, Major League Baseball and NASCAR futures; new, expanded TV and radio listings in an easy-to-read format; and new major-sports game roundups with game notes.

The Sun's lead sports columnist and boxing expert, Dean Juipe, will continue his Sports section front-page column Monday, Wednesday and Friday and his boxing notebook Thursday.

On Friday the Sun will have an exclusive motor sports page under the guidance of writer Brian Hilderbrand. The page will feature notes and standings from all the major racing series including NASCAR, CART, Formula One, the Indy Racing League and NHRA drag racing.

It will also feature a weekly NASCAR cartoon by the Sun's own Mike Smith, which has proved immensely popular with newspapers across the country since he began drawing it this year. Smith's award-winning, nationally syndicated editorial cartoons will, of course, continue to appear every day on the Sun's editorial page.

The Accent section will introduce another new column by a Sun staffer. Every Monday Melissa Schorr will comment on events from the perspective of a 20-something, a complement, or occasionally perhaps a counterpoint, to Ruthe Deskin's Thursday column from the viewpoint of a (somewhat) older writer.

Scott Dickensheets, who has been writing a lifestyle column, will switch gears to become the Sun's Critic at Large, with a mandate to write about whatever is going on in the valley he thinks needs writing about. His column, which will appear on Tuesdays and Sundays, will include, but not be limited to, the arts.

On Wednesdays Muriel Stevens will continue to write her recently introduced column on that most essential and popular pastime, shopping. Features Editor Steve Bornfeld's witty and incisive television column will move to Fridays. And longtime Sun entertainment writer Joe Delaney will continue to grace our pages every week.

Because of press restrictions Accent will be split into two sections most Fridays, and when that occurs the Sun's movie reviews, listings and stories will be placed together at the end of the Business section, usually beginning on page 5. The Sun's reviewers include the increasingly popular local pair The Movie Guys and, exclusively in Las Vegas, Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert.

Our advice columns and comics -- including Dilbert -- will be anchored every day on the inside back two pages of Accent. Since they have moved around among three or four sections of the paper every day depending on press needs, both they and our readers will no doubt sigh in relief that they have finally found a home.

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