If the graffiti marring the billboard below look just a little too nice, there's a reason. They are corporate graffiti, performed not by angry teenagers in the dead of night but commissioned by Flordia's Tallahassee Democrat to call attention to its redesign.

Back in January, the Democrat put up nine billboards, black and white and fairly dull, along main roads around Tallahassee, declaring that the paper was "An Important Part of Every Day." "A Good Paper," and so forth. In mid-March the billboards were "defaced" -- decorated with drawings of such things as toilet paper and fish, as in fish-wrapper. Then, in mid-April, on the day of the newly designed Democrat's debut, came a new set of billboards, declaring that -- as if the graffiti had been the result of some public protest -- "We can take a hint," and announcing the redesign.

If the campaign "got a lot of talk around town," as the newspaper's ad agency asserts, it also got some talk in the newsroom, where a number of journalists, who hadn't been told that the graffiti were part of their paper's campaign, read the message as a putdown of their work. "Most of us were not amused," says one reporter.

The redesign, however, is another matter; reporters and editors seem generally pleased. As executive editor Lou Heldman points out, the change in the Democrat is not merely a redesign, but a reader-driven drive for a more complete newspaper. Heldman says that, by the end of the year, the 59,0000-circulation newspaper will have added six reporters and editors and thirty more pages of news.

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