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Star-Telegram readers may soon be startled by the front page of their newspaper...

Others say replacing the top stories of the day with an index of the paper's contents is self-defeating. Who wants a daily newspaper without any news on its front page? What's the point of burying big stories on the "airplane pages'' -- the B-52s and F-16s deep inside the sections?

Craig Flournoy, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who teaches journalism at Southern Methodist University, said he commends the Star-Telegram "for trying to be more responsive to readers.'' But, Flournoy added, "publishing a newspaper with no stories on the front page is like serving chicken-fried steak with no beef. Requiring that only a single page-one story can jump to the inside is equally insipid. Readers deserve better.''

Neither Witt nor Star-Telegram president and publisher Wesley R. Turner -- who some say consented to Witt's plan despite his own misgivings -- returned calls from the Weekly about the much-to-do redo. The Weekly, however, obtained a copy of Witt's four-page self-described "bare bones" redesign memo. (Brevity, apparently, is good for journalism but not for journalists.)

The memo, according to one staffer, was e-mailed to editorial employees only after rumors of the big change began to circulate in the one of the few places on earth where no secret is safe -- a newsroom. And as of Tuesday, the Star-Telegram had not yet told readers that they would soon find a stranger lounging in their front yards.

The seed for Witt's makeover, the staffer said, grew from a good journalism initiative from the Star-Telegram's parent company, Knight-Ridder. "There were a whole bunch of committees [at the Star-Telegram] studying how to improve the paper,'' the staffer explained. "All the groups got called into a meeting. It was at that point that they announced this.'' An official announcement was supposed to come later when details were worked out but "by the time most of those people got back to the newsroom, it was already out. Everybody was in an uproar.''

Others said the change is one that Witt has yearned to implement for years. By his own admission, Witt is eager to go "lite" when he thinks it will boost circulation. In one mid-1990s column he recounted a decision to publish a front-page crime story with a tabloid headline that screamed: "Poodle Slain by Archer.'' One former S-T writer also remembers a late 1990s Witt decree that banned most stories exceeding 15 inches -- the length of a typical newspaper yarn. About the same time, the Star-Telegram began running very short stories of marginal relevance on page 2 -- a development that prompted a colleague to predict: "If Witt has his way, the entire paper will look like page 2.''

That water-cooler prophecy appears to be coming true with Witt's makeover. In his memo, Witt says the biggest change in the paper is "one you've already started to see in the paper on every section front --we're trying to find ways NOT to jump stories inside. Research has long shown that readers detest having to follow a jump. There are several techniques to get around that -- the first, of course, being to write shorter stories that hold to the cover.''

Newspapers have toyed for decades with putting very short stories on the front pages, stories that don't need to be continued inside. But the practice has been limited because it is difficult to impossible to tell the day's top stories or explain the intricacies of complex news in a few hundred words. So decreeing that more short stories will run out front, to most journalists, means more "fluff" will move to center stage and force important stories inside.

Other options suggested by Witt include putting a short story on the front page, then referring readers to a sidebar or a more complete story on the same subject, inside the paper, "if the reader desires even more information.''

Although Witt's memo insists that the change would not decrease his paper's coverage of in-depth news, some already question the paper's commitment to serious news. A taste of the new philosophy, for example, was provided by the paper's June 23 coverage of a big national news story with potential impact on all but the most remote hinterlands -- a federal judge's approval of a class-action sex-discrimination lawsuit against the nation's largest retailer, Wal-Mart. The story, which could involve more than a million past and present Wal-Mart workers, received extensive front-page coverage in newspapers across the nation.

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