How Mayo Today attracts readers

“I gravitate toward feature-length stories rather than sidebars and pullouts,” says the longtime editor of Mayo Clinic’s employee magazine Mayo Today.

But in 2005 the publication’s editorial board decided to revamp the magazine, giving it both a new look and a new content approach.

The goal was the same as that of many organizational editors in recent years, “to give the publication the look and feel of a news magazine—more consumer magazine and less corporate publication,” says Finnamore, who was a reporter and photographer for a small-town newspaper before joining Mayo 19 years ago.

“The new design forced me to think more about photos and cover images, and hearing from readers more and more about how they ‘really like the short stuff’ made me think about the stories as packages rather than features,” he says.

That’s why the new design of the bimonthly Mayo Today not only has more visual punch, but is also immensely more readable.

Since the initial redesign, the layout has continued to progress over the past couple of years resulting in the breaking up of content into dozens of readable chunks, with better use of sidebars, pull quotes, captions and headlines.