If you admire clean and classic journalism style, you probably became a fast fan of The Journalist theme. Well today The Journalist got a bit of a makeover, care of Lucian Marin, that might make you fall in love even more:
The bar that contains your tags, categories and post info is now more subtle, and has swapped positions with the comment count, bringing the attention to your brilliant content.
Your subtitle appears in a cute little word bubble in the upper right, and the header font has been freshened up as a sans serif.
Print geeks, enjoy. And don’t forget you’ll need to look under “T” for “The” under Design > Themes in your dashboard.
(UPDATE: Classic “The Journalist” is still available. It’s called The Journalist v1.3 under Design > Themes.)
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Mm…I think I might have liked it better before. The speech bubble is particularly detracting.
Its very nice in general, but I don’t like it to put frames around the images I insert into my posts. I try to have a solemn, black-whitish style and images/photos were nicely padded horizontally after insertion. In this version there is no padding and there are unsolicited frames…
No Custom Header Image No way! 🙂
I need a new theme with:
3 Columns
Custom Header Image
Clean and nice page settings
Did I ask too much?! 🙂
I’d like to try it but as a commenter note above:
I like the new revisions… especially the subtitle…
However, its a little weird for the pages when your page title is followed by the words “without comments’
So I’ll try it if you move the comments to somewhere else.
Half the screen is all black. I really liked this theme, but its not working anymore. I moved back to Cutline.
nice
like the clean feel
don’t like it either. was very happy with it untill now, but right now I feel disappointed. hate those blues in the side bar and the font change. it’s a new thing alltogether, and I think you should have kept the prevoius option, and the new one. silly me that went and tried the new version without realizing the actual changes it would imply… now there´s no turning back.
will have to look for something else.
you should really still offer the older version for those who enjoyed it, I know I was in the process of changing the look of my blog using the journalist and right as I finished it got upgraded thus making hr’s of work completely pointless.
You should really offer both versions.
You got to have a lot a fans! What a nice picture.
“Without comments”? I am (nearly) speechless.
Really, really, this *IS* a new theme and should be called “The Journalist Revisited” or 2.0 or something, giving us the choice to switch to it.
Yes, even if the servers and the engine and everything except the content is in your hands, and we love you for the work you do, many of us are still pro-choice, when it comes to blogs. Tut tut.
By now the highest authority (hey, Matt!) should have known how much about identity (have I said choice?) some things out there in the Internets are. Remember the Facebook (was it Facebook?) commotion some months ago?
And we (I, for one) don’t like to have the metaphorical carpet snatched under our feet when it comes to (nearly) one-year-old blogs with 500 and counting posts to check and who knows how many images to resize (as if it’s not time-consuming as it is) and border around images to suffer in silence.
And contents in sans serif, to quote many fellow users and commenters? C’mon, large chunks of stuff are readable *only* if those lettery, loopy, bendy things they are made of have squiggly lines that help the eye going from one to the other.
It’s sucks. Images are surrounded in blue. Bugs. It sucks big time!
Wow, this is a big improvement. Thank you so much for the theme.
Ruined my blog also. Should’ve just created a new theme and left Journalist alone. No one asked…just changed it overnight…sheesh! Let me find a new theme…
Cool!
“If you admire clean and classic journalism style, you probably became a fast fan of The Journalist theme.”
Exactly the point of choosing it in the first place. When seeing this new mess this morning, it looked like someone had hacked my blog…sheesh!
Hi everyone – i suspect we need to use the feedback form to register our interests in keeping the old and new Journalist as options. I’m not sure the comments will reach the right admin people. See below links. I for one would like the OPTION. i.e. the reason for having multiple template options in the first place…..
Regardless of whether I like it or not, I’m a bit surprised that you would unilaterally change the look of my blog.
Ugh.
I’d like there to be the option to use the old template. The blue border on photos is terrible, the fonts used are less mature-looking, and the “without comments” placement is very annoying.
Please help WordPress!
I liked the old one better… now my text is totally pressed against the left side of my screen,
is this just me or are there other people with the same problemo?
And now the numbers from the calender are much bigger and blue. 😦
Is it possible to get the old one back and let people chooze witch theme the whant.. the new or the old one???
ps: sorry about my bad english.
Greetz Tijger.
i’ve been using the journalism style since i started. i’ll try this immediately 😀
It’s nice…but to me a customizable header is vital.
Old version of Journalist was good enough. This one looks too much complicated. I wish you could revert back to earlier version!
Um, why didn’t you just do what you did with Sandbox and keep the old version up alongside the new one? That way everyone would have been happy. It’s not like you only have room for x number of themes.
Pour moi, c’est une vraie catastrophe …
Je vais probablement devoir supprimer mes 4 blogs sur WordPress. (Up)
(For me, it is a true disaster… I am probably going to have to delete(eliminate) my 4 blogs on WordPress.)
Cooool!
New theme is great, but it shouldn’t have automatically replaced what we had without warning.
By default the old layout should have been kept and then an option to change to the new one.
Meh, don’t like it.
Nice journalist 🙂
Liked it before – then it was frankly the best. Don’t like the revised version at all, for most of the reasons laid out already. Least likeable is the balloon; then the “comments” tag right under the post title; and then there is the problem of that gray bar below the post (tidy, but not good-looking). The earlier version had a nice balance, and the dark bar under the title was very classy. This version looks ordinary! The thought of choosing and tweaking another theme is tiring… Won’t you please consider making this revised theme a /new/ one and reverting back to the tried and tested version?
I cannot understand why the wordpress.com templates and themes are so naffy and kitsch! I use wp.com for three blogs and compared with the simple and strong beauty of a theme like limauorange which I use for one of my wp.org based blogs, I despair every time I have to contend with the wp.com templates – the lack of chic styling, the lack of functional searching and archiving, and a general lack of basic plugins which should be elementary on all blogs these days. Worst of all is the lack of options to customise quite ugly elements, a problem NOT solved by paying for upgrades to modify the CSS. I mean, why do the LINKS all have to be lined up one category below the other in the same sidebar? This revision of the Journalist theme is very disappointing. I can’t see why so much effort is put into wordpress.com as an entity and yet no real effort or attention is paid to lifting the designs up to a level which would make them truly world class. I know you’ve got the best resources, why not develop equally classy and clever templates to match? I love my wp blogs, that’s why I care enough to make this comment.
Well, I like the changes, but perhaps both the old and new build of the theme could be provided, as you do with the Sandbox theme.
well, the side bar could move to the right side abit more as the photo is being cut when being published. And the border of the photographs, is really distracting. Best for the border would be thinner border and black or white in colour. It would make the Journalist theme much better.
The bubble speech is really beautiful.
hope to see some changes, but still good effort done! 🙂
Thanks!
And some posts with photos in the text have gone all wrong… :^(
Please change it back. Please.
This new version makes my site look amateurish. As a professional journalist I really admired the look of the old version.
It’s, even more, my prefered theme.
It is an improvement, thanks Lucian!
I recently choose this theme for my new site & it would be hard for me to change now.
how’s this for an idea – as i can see the previous commenters don’t like the upgrade
when ever a design/them ‘improvement’ happens
– call it something else .eg Journalist01
2 for the prise of one
– unless it was changed because it had gremlins!
it has to be tough to go for a design ,
learn to work with it and then it gets changed
into something you don’t like
i hope that doesn’t happen to ‘sleepless’ !
the grey border i was told only appears if you centre the image on the page?
or i was told, if you add a caption
it’s terrible when design wise, you have no choice
– always have a wee box to select or not PLEAZA!
How does anybody that’s not particularly familiar with WordPress find out how to do all the bells and whistles on these Themes. Such as borders for photos, pullquotes, etc. (I’m not talking about the generic ones that come with the themes.)
I have used the Journalist theme on one of my Blogs and frankly, the ‘older’ version was better!
The Gray border around images is a put-off and so is the comments count display at the top. Why not have Ver. 1 and Ver. 2 of the theme so that users can choose whichever they want.
P.S: The same Journalist theme, with a few CSS tweaks is used at http://www.harshj.com/ and look how classy it looks 🙂
Really don’t care much for the way the blog looks with the new theme . . . and disappointed that it was thrust upon us without a choice. Hope that we will have the choice in the (near) future of either the new or old Journalist theme!
heather your hot 🙂
It’s horrible.
How some improvements have ruined the look of my blog.
Flash back please!
Yes! Thanks for this!
I don’t like it. Can we use the old one, somehow?
Heather,
by some of the comments, I realized that an existing theme has changed and the authors that make use of it were all affected, some in non-desirable ways. As an author that had carefully selected the theme to match a specific result with the readers, I am very concerned that it could be possible that other themes will come to change like this one in some future moment. I’d like to hear more about this possibility and how to avoid such kind of potential problem (is there some upgrade that enable to save the theme in the author’s dashboard ?).
I think this theme would be better if it were offered as a second version.
I like the original one better, even though I don’t use it anymore.
The blog http://kohlanta-tv.net/ was ranked in the Top Blog of the day http://botd.wordpress.com/2008/09/22/top-blogs-880/ in position 30 with 14,330 page views on the same day.
The new version of the theme The Tournalist destroyed the appearance of the blog.
😦
Is it possible to reactivate the previous version of the theme ?
Please. Thank you very much …
JL
The revised Journalist theme is cooler than previous one. My blog looks handsome with it. Thank you, but no thank you because with this theme the side bar of my blog goes down and it is not coming up parellel or equivalent with the counterpart of blog. I wish to switch my blog’s theme to the revised Journalist theme but due to above mentioned reason I am not going to change the theme of my blog.
Hmmm… 🙂
Please give me the option to use the old theme. My photos don’t fit the new column width and I much preferred the older look. I liked the old style because I could display 720 pixel images. Now they all look horrible, running over into the right column. Why would you do this without warning folks first? At least give us some time to make adjustments before changing the theme on us. Please let me (and others) switch back.
I’ve taken my blog offline. The content was formatted according to the previous version and does not work correctly with the new version or any of the other templates. Thank you.
Sorry WP Team & Lucian Marin, but this time you’re mistaken. These are not improvements on an existing theme, this is a new theme. Sure, “The Journalist” was not perfect, but it didn’t need such modifications; infact it now looks totally like something else, beginning with the gone black category bar and going on for.. like every single thing that made me and many other love this theme.
I should change theme, but this is gonna eat so much time by re-designing my posts. Oh well. 😦
I really do not like it. I like the font style much better for the previous version. Now the current one looks so unprofessional both in IE and FireFOX
Heather,
Could you or someone from WordPress address the numerous comments of dissatisfaction with the new design and if anything will be done before everyone attempts figure out new designs.
It would have been better to do some market research prior to making unnecessary changes.
The bubble in the upper-right is cartoonish and distracting.
Returning the ” # Comments | Without Comments ” to the bottom is clearly preferred. The first item someone
would read is the content first, and then comments. It’s like reading the caption of a photo, and then seeing the photo.
I am terribly unhappy with the change of “the journalist” theme. It was perfect the way it was before, I had chosen it for the very features that have been removed. Please put them back!!! Give me back the theme I chose in the first place.
Time to roll back to the previous version, mainly because it’s not “internationalized” correctly. I’m from Brazil, and PT-br version has all of the theme is all in English, and the comments link show as “leave a comment »with one commentwith % comments”.
In other words, it’s broken. That should be enough to ask you to roll back. The lack of internationalization is another one. Plus, the feel is not the same.
I think the adoption was hasty and that bloggers should have been allowed a choice, especially if we are the ones using these themes. This is what posting a single comment on a post does, and it appears in large print right beneath the title:
leave a comment »with one commentwith % comments
That it does that and no one noticed before suggests it was not even properly tested.
The format is no longer clean, simple, minimalist, and professional looking. If WordPress cared at all, it would revert the template to what it was before.
WOW!!!! F****ng NICE theme!!!!
Congratz to WordPress again!!!
I don’t use this theme, but I do think that all the negative comments – not to mention trashed blogs – deserve a response. To be honest, I find the idea of imposing such a revised blog intrinsically wrong. As has been suggested, a lot, surely a revision like this should simply be offered as an alternative theme? That way everyone wins and no-one is seriously hacked off about their blog being given a look they really don’t want (or have to re-jig their images to fit the new proportions).
We’ve heard you loud and clear, and have taken your feedback into account. For those of you that enjoyed the old version better, just go to Design > Themes -> The Journalist v1.3.
OK!
It’s possible to remove the ugly elements (oversized images, and so on) without sacrificing the good improvements!
Thank you
I really like most of the style. The elements I’m not wild about are:
(1) The comments being at the top of the post instead of the bottom. I think it’ll make it harder to get readers to leave comments. I prefer the bottom of the post.
(2) The quotation signs on the side of one’s quoted section. I don’t think they look good, especially if one is quoting several short sections from the same or different pieces. One thing I wouldn’t mind seeing on the quotation signs, is just making them smaller and seeing if that makes a difference … I think they’d look a lot better if smaller but I’d rather none.
My preference to signify a quoted section would be a slightly tinted colour behind the text. I think this journalistic style would be excellent if that was available, and the quotation signs on the side were gone.
Look bright …
THANKS NOEL!!!
I don’t like the new changes. Why alter something that didn’t need to be fixed? Could you please set up an old and new journalist…I hate how the links are at the bottom; and the comments link is too confusing.
Appreciate that, Noel 🙂
If the problem of insufficient white space around graphics placed within text was sorted – I’d be happy to stay with the “new” journalist.
A more general issue: When I tried to switch themes — for a while the old Journalist theme wasn’t available, so I decided to use another theme — I found that the widgets I’d set for the previous theme (on “Sidebar 1”) were hidden away and I couldn’t add or remove them under the new theme (Andreas09, which has “Main Sidebar” and “Right Sidebar”). I had to switch back to the (new) Journalist theme to remove the widgets so that I could re-add them under the new theme.
If the WordPress staff can provide a more graceful way of moving widgets from one thing to another, I’ll be grateful.
Wow, thank you so much — so relieved to be back to normal.
Wow. This is what I call super-fast feedback. WordPress Team, you rock… period!
“The Journalist, Restored”. Thank you, guys and gals! Are we good? 🙂
Thanks for listening. Really.
Thanks for keeping v1.3 available!
I think they are indeed almost two different themes. I’m glad you made them both avalaible. But, in my humble opinion, the new “version” is a real beauty: thumbs up!
That is probably liked by journalists, but I am a rich web-design fan and I like it not be simple
The old one was much nicer, IMHO- how about an option to choose between them? I miss the serif font.
instead of upgrading existing theme without notice, it was better to add the new version as a new theme named journalist2 or so.
the new them does not fit well into my weblog and I don’t know how to roll it back 😦
thanks
I really like the previous version
Another in a long line of useless themes no one will use. Just allow standard blogs to edit the CSS and we can dispense with all these illogically navigated, ugly, poorly designed themes, you can fire that talentless group of hacks you have putting out these sh**ty little pages and let us have control of our own designs. You’ll immediately make the internet a lot prettier and easier to use when everyone who knows anything about css can make their own design. Even a novice could do better than these lame excuses for themes. I’m unimpressed and disgusted that you roll out a new useless theme every week when you could be doing something useful, like coming up with better plug-in support. Thanks for nothing.
To make things clear: 99% of the themes we currently have available have been designed by other designers, not our staff. Most of them professional designers, too.
thanks for changing ‘no comment’ into leave a comment. thats better.
aaaahh and now you can disable the bubble.
much better
great job
thanks for making available the old version again. great.
Thanks for bringing back the old one–you guys are great!
“Heather”??? –her “photograph”??? “Heather” posted new theme announcement??? lol –REALLY want to know: HOW do Commenters KNOW who/which staffer posts announcement/feature? WHERE does “Heather” name appear? (I hate mysteries, can’t figure out how anyone guesses(?) which staffer…?)
If WP is interested:
I know something about typefaces –loathe san serif fonts; think 98% of WP.com themes: dull, unsophisticated, uninspiring, disappointing, some actually dated, corny and/or un-readable design; this theme: ya, OK, so? –ANOTHER theme with background that is, gee, white…so…? I’m (still) waiting on what I suggested three years ago: theme with cream-colored ground/ability to change a theme’s ground to color of MY choice (ala blogspot.com, of which they DID listen to me…). Till then: as long as Superb PRESSROW is available, utterly indifferent what theme does/doesn’t go up. –It goes, I go. Cheers.
@Poppy: You should be able to see my avatar and author name next to the text of this post. If you can’t, please contact Support.
Hi – the theme looks okay but your previous version was amazing it was the first theme I really liked in wordpress.com. Please can you upload both so those who love the new theme can use it and those that love the old can use it.
Tudor
nice theme… good work! 🙂
I would say leave off the tags completely, for the main page, because for heavy taggers (like me) it gets cumbersome.
I don’t like that linked images by default have outlines now. It looks trashy. I think the changes to the header makes it look less polished. Same with the comments line.
What would be really useful would be a way to create a bibliography at the end of each post in this theme. I would kill for that.
I’ll stick with the old blog theme. If it’s not broke…why fix?
Coolness!
Hey, thanks for acting so quickly on everyone’s feedback about the new theme. Just another reason for me to keep using WordPress.