The Vicksburg Post is starting the year thinner (which is something many of us would like to say about our personal measurements) and wider (which is something most of us would like to avoid having to say).

The thinner aspect is the measurement across the page. Sunday’s pages were 13 3/4 inches. Today’s are 12.

The new size is the same as The Clarion-Ledger in Jackson. Most newspapers across the state and nation are already 12 inches. The reason? Cost. Newsprint is purchased by the ton. During 2008, the price rose at record rates — doubling what it was a short time ago. Even though all the paper The Vicksburg Post buys has recycled content, the biggest cost in producing paper is energy. And everyone knows what’s happened to energy prices.

In fact, we hear that some other papers will be reducing more, down to 11 inches or less. The Vicksburg Post is not doing that. Or at least not anytime soon. After all, the last slenderizing was nearly 30 years ago when the size was adjusted, as it is today, to conform to national standards. Before that, pages were 16 inches wide.

As long as I have been an employee here, this company has not been big on changes — or at least change for the sake of change. Subscribers get accustomed to the arrangement of a newspaper and would be rankled, say, if the crossword puzzle started appearing in the first section.

A level of familiarity is also established with comics and advice and editorial columnists. It’s best not to move things around or drop and add on whims.

One thing The Vicksburg Post has already lost with the page reduction has been the daily TV grids. The page would just be too narrow to include as many channels as we’d like. The solution has been to enlarge and improve the weekly guide issued on Sundays and encourage readers who used the daily grids to remember to save the weekly grid instead.

Other than that, there will be as few changes as possible. Same paper, just thinner.

Where The Vicksburg Post has become wider in the past few months has been in its reach through the Internet. The company has been a leader in keeping up with technology.

An example: Within a couple of hours of the robbery of the BancorpSouth branch here just before Christmas, any person at any computer terminal anywhere in the world could navigate to the Post’s Web site and see a color photo from the bank security camera of the robber standing at the counter, gun and money in front of him. That’s a wide reach for a small-city newspaper.

Another change I’ve noticed is that more people are submitting letters to the editor online and, if we’ve stepped on an interest group’s toes, we hear about it quickly. After an editorial last Sunday called methamphetamine a nightmare in Warren County, letters came from far and wide. People with their search engines set to provide alert them when certain words appear on the Internet wrote letters to the editor, most of them to tell us drug use should be legalized.

There’s one more dimension: Depth. Editors here each day plan editions to make the best use of whatever print space is available. But the Web site has no size limitations. We can print two or three photos from a football game in the paper, and offer another 20 on the Web site. We can write a story summarizing Barack Obama’s inaugural address. We can display the whole speech on the Web site.

The Vicksburg Post greets 2009 with thinner pages offering as much local news and information as we can and, through the Internet, with more depth and to a far wider audience than ever before.

Both reflect developments a previous generation would have believed improbable if not impossible.

*

Charlie Mitchell is executive editor of The Vicksburg Post. Write to him at Box 821668, Vicksburg, MS 39182, or e-mail cmitchell@vicksburgpost.com.