MONROE — The Year 2023 represents the 125th consecutive year of publication of the Monroe Times. While our official anniversary is Oct. 13, we are commemorating this milestone mark all year long.
As editor, part of my job is to give a reflection of our local communities into the newspaper.
In 2020, with Cheese Days on hold, we ran a Swiss Heritage special section. My particular story was about the history of Turner Hall, and when laying out the cover, I found the Goudy text font to duplicate the logo on the Turner Hall building.
It’s actually a pretty familiar font in the region, with many other longtime local businesses using a variation of the font, like Roelli Cheese, Puempel’s Tavern and the New Glarus Hotel.
When I first joined the Times newsroom in 2008, then-editor Jeff Rogers mentioned to me one day about editors changing the header “as a rite of passage.” Back then, as a fresh young 23-year-old in the newsroom, I began thinking of creating a new logo with my own twist.
In 2020, shortly after the Swiss Heritage section was published, I took over as editor, and the wheels in my head began to spin with ideas of a new masthead.
While I couldn’t just overhaul the Monroe Times logo on a whim — especially a logo with very little alteration for nearly three decades — I could begin planning, so I did. There were a few hiccups along the way, but when the 125th anniversary was a sight in the nearby future, I pushed my idea around the office.
Like I said, our current logo hasn’t changed in 15 years, and mostly minor changes have only minor other changes have occurred dating back to 1993.
In fact, while there have been a few tweaks here and there, the paper has only had a handful of major logo changes.
Throughout the first 75 years of the company, the masthead at the top of front page was practically the same: “MONROE EVENING TIMES” was in all-caps and spaced out evenly across the entire top of the page. In 1905, the paper’s 7th year, the first letter of each word was slightly raised, only for the paper to revert back in 1920. Founder Emery Odell was the editor for both changes.
In 1975, the first major change came, with “Monroe” stacked on top of “Evening Times”. The next year, a new font was donned altogether, with a piece of cartoon cheese joining the mix, while “Monroe Evening” was shrunk and outside of a box than wrapped around a thick, large-font “Times”. In 1977, the logo moved off the top of the front page and was more centralized above the fold. However, the very next year the paper returned to the original page header.
By 1982, advertisements began running above the masthead, and in 1986, a black box inverted the text color of the masthead, and the two versions would flip back and forth for a decade.
In 1993, a new font and rearrangement of the structure took over the masthead once again. “The Monroe Evening” was all-caps, but a smaller font to the side of a new, larger “Times” font. In 1996, “The Monroe” was moved above the “Times”, with the “T” taller than the lowercase “imes”. “Evening” was dropped from the logo entirely — in fact, the newspaper hasn’t officially gone by as the “Monroe Evening Times” since.
The next year, the “imes” was capitalized again. The final change came in 2007, when the capital “T” in Times was lowered to match the rest of the word, and the historic Green County Courthouse joining the masthead.
And that is where we sat for 15 years — until now.
The Goudy font isn’t unique in the newspaper industry: In fact, many other major publications use a variation of it, like the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and the Miami Herald. The font signifies a connection to the 19th century (or before). It is “old” looking — classical almost. It’s not gimmicky, it’s not a new, modernized or digitized look.
It has a sense of history; of professionalism; of stature. The Monroe Times has won the Weekly Newspaper of the Year award in Wisconsin in three of the past four years, and given the Swiss and Germanic heritage of the area, I thought it was the perfect font to connect our paper and readers of today with the generations that came before us in the state line region.
— Adam Krebs is the editor of the Times. He can be reached at editor@themonroetimes.com.