Bermudians at home and abroad will have spent the past 48 hours nervously studying updates on the progress of Hurricane Joaquin. The weather system, which at one stage over the weekend was a fraction short of being a Category 5 storm, proved not to be as dangerous to us as it might have been. But we were right to be on our guard and prepared for the worst, especially in light of the Fay-Gonzalo double whammy that so misshapened our landscape in October 2014.

Trust The Royal Gazette, then, to slip in a cheeky redesign while you were otherwise engaged. You will have to take our word for it that Joaquin’s passage in our vicinity was not made to order as a diversionary tactic to coincide with these changes. We really do hope that you embrace the new look and the many wrinkles that come with it.

With the future of print journalism coming increasingly under threat, our duty is to keep the public not only informed and educated, but also entertained. The challenges in our industry are many and varied, led by myriad forms of social media, websites and tablets, but we should always aim to give the reader something that appeals — and we had been long overdue a bit of a facelift.

With that noted, we hope, through the endeavour of a very talented staff of designers and sub-editors, that your reading experience is made all the more pleasurable during this phase of change.

Notwithstanding a body type change throughout the newspaper, the chief beneficiaries of the redesign are the obituaries page and the sports pages, with the latter shifting to the back of the paper working inward.

“Moving the obits page,” some might complain. “How dare you. Sacrilege.”

This was not a decision taken lightly, given the popularity of obituaries, but we believe that the new position just before the weather page will be far better suited to that feature. With the weather page situated at the back of the first section every day, the obits will be part of the local news pages, thus making it possible in story form for us to memorialise our dearly departed on that page as opposed to twinning the page with overseas news, as had been the case previously. Today, the obituaries can be found on page 11, with the lead story on the page a tribute to Mildred Hill, the matriarch from Southampton, who in her lifetime made such a significant contribution to the Anglican Church.

Moving sport to the back of the paper can be said to be the trigger in this redesign, owing to a necessity to make the newspaper more user-friendly. We have received numerous inquiries, or complaints, through the years over the public not knowing on which page certain sections could be found.

Sport, Business and Lifestyle are worthy of a section front in their own right, but the configuration of our presses made it impossible for that to be done for each in the same edition.

The reintroduction in recent months of an index titled “Must Reads” has been of help, but placing Sport on the back guarantees now that each section has a section front every day that any reader cannot help but find. Not only that, but the move brings the Gazette into line with several of the leading international newspapers, especially the tabloid versions, for whom sport on the back is an absolute necessity.

The window dressing to those two significant changes is that Overseas, instead of enduring a nomadic existence in the edition — here, there and everywhere — will run on consecutive pages in the same section as Business. Every day.

Speaking of window dressing, each of the section fronts has been freshened, as well as subsections such as Overseas, Religion, Classifieds and Personal Finance, which has been rebranded as Money. Downgraded from subsection status to straps, but still well appointed, are Tech Today, Bermuda Works, Bermuda Home Finder and Young Observer.

For all the positives, there had to be one fall guy, and that is the space-filling but ultimately unpopular television grid that formerly appeared in the Lifestyle section.

We could have done without Joaquin raining on our parade, but all in all, the Island has come through the inclement weather well, and we can look forward to a good run with this new look.

It is a look that we believe to be worthy of Bermuda’s only daily.