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Flush from the stunning success of the weekend edition, the Wall Street Journal has decided to tear the guts out of anachronistic print-media fans by shrinking their paper:

The width of the Journal will change to the industry standard 48-inch web width from its current 60-inch web width. Dow Jones said retrofitting 19 presses in the Journal's 17 print sites to print the new web width will require about 15 months.

Which will make it about the size of, or slightly narrower than, just about every other recently-narrowed paper in the country — a loss of 3 inches, from 15 to 12.

When the news first came through the wires, we had brief, feverish hallucinations of the Journal going tabloid (RATE RISE ROILS IRATE INVESTORS! GRIEF FOR FED CHIEF!), but it looks as though we won't be seeing that until the next terrified sky-is-falling newsprint-costs-are-rising redesign, which is scheduled for early 2008.

The important question here, of course, is how this redesign will affect glorious weekend travel and lifestyle spreads — will there be room for the favorite hotdish recipe of the Johnson & Johnson board of directors?

Wall Street Journal to Make Design and Content Changes [WSJ]