You called, we have responded

On Wednesday we rolled out a new configuration for a few of our more popular features ­­— and it wasn’t exactly met with rave reviews. Honestly, it went over like a lead balloon. Dozens of readers took time to call or write to let us know that the puzzles were too cramped and the font size too small.

First of all, thank you for calling. Direct feedback from readers is vitally important to us. Hearing from you helps guide our decisions on everything from what type of news, opinion and features you want to read about, to how those items appear on the page and online.

On that front, we heard you loud and clear. The daily diversions are immensely popular among our most loyal readers — and the bigger those puzzles are printed, the better.

In response to your concerns, the daily crossword, Jumble, Hocus-Focus and sudoku will now be larger than they ever have been. They will be packaged together with the weather on the back of the sports section every day.

Also in response to your calls, we’ve enlarged our two single-panel comics — Family Circus and Rubes — and placed them with the other comic strips which are now sized proportionally.

The motivation behind the page reconfiguration is to maximize the turf available for news articles, photography and features through better management of our overall printed space.

While we didn’t get it quite right the first time, we hope these updates fit the bill for the majority of our readers while also achieving our goal of page efficiency.

Thank you for your feedback. After all, the reason we do this every day is for you, the readers.