Welcome to Asheville

Visitors enjoy the WORLD Watch set

August is still peak travel season, and we expect to welcome many WORLD friends to our Asheville, N.C., home this month. Be advised, though, the combination of record airline travel everywhere and major construction at the Asheville airport make for big crowds and big delays.

Record airline travel: Based on TSA data, U.S. air travel around the beginning of the summer season in June was up 6.1 percent year on year—mitigated somewhat by the fact that June 2023 was just barely back to pre-pandemic levels. July 7, the Sunday after Independence Day, was a record breaker, with the highest-ever number of U.S. air travelers in a single day.

Major construction at Asheville airport: The plan is to expand the airport’s capacity. In the meantime, the growing traffic is confined to less than half the original space, with half-measures accommodating the passengers and planes.

The highways are similarly busy this summer, and I’ve noticed crowded streets around town. Please don’t be discouraged. We want to see you, but do be sure you budget extra time.

One WORLD change I won’t assume you noticed but which does make a big difference: The size of our magazine pages is larger. The biweekly magazine was 8 inches wide by 10½ inches tall. The new magazine is 8⅝ inches by 10⅞ inches. Half an inch here, three-quarters there—it may not seem like a big difference, but the wider and taller pages provide an area that is more than 10 percent bigger, so we can fit more than 10 percent more words per page, all other things being equal.

Of course, all other things are not always equal. Subtle design changes can also create more space for words. This WORLD Notes section is one example. In addition to the larger page size, the design team (wisely) removed my photo from the print edition, and they removed a narrow column of ad space. With those changes, I’m able to say 50 percent more.

Speaking of ad space, you’ll typically see fewer ads in the pages of the new monthly relative to the old biweekly. Don’t misunderstand—we like our ads. Our aim is for our ads to provide a real benefit to our readers by calling attention to institutions and products that may be helpful or interesting, and at the same time provide another source of revenue to help power our mission. But ads aren’t our purpose in publishing, so we’d rather give you more pages of content than more ads. You’ll see about 120 fewer pages of ads over the course of the year in this new format.

Finally, our Voices columns. For the past 15 years or so as a biweekly, we gave you five regular Voices columns in each issue, along with occasional extras—so at least 10 per month. We dropped that number to eight per month in 2022 because two of our regular columnists left us.

For the past few months, in preparation for the monthly magazine, we’ve thought a good bit about what the best mix of Voices should be, and one question loomed large among many others: Should we even attempt to replace the column Joel Belz wrote for nearly 40 years?

The answer was an obvious, emphatic “no.” There’s no replacing Joel, or his column. But we did determine that one of the columns should represent an institutional voice of WORLD’s editorial team, as Joel’s column was for decades. With that in mind, you’ll see Nick Eicher’s column in each issue, and another with contributions from a different writer each issue. That will bring our per-issue number of regular Voices columns back to five, even though now the issues themselves come only monthly.

Of course, that total decrease in commentary columns in the magazine is offset by the digital WORLD Opinions project. Combining the Voices columns in the magazine and the Opinions section online at wng.org, we still offer nearly as much commentary and analysis as we did when we first offered our online Commentary page back in 2006.

The reduction in commentary in print goes along with our strategic commitment to emphasize reporting, in print and digitally and in our audio and video programs. With all these changes to the magazine, we are able to offer more reporting in print, even in half the number of issues.