Page Critiques and Comment

“Design is fine, but not at the expense of content.”

That was a comment from a reader after last week’s introduction of the newly-redesigned Los Angeles Times. About 80 percent of the 300 or so reader comments were negative, which is partly to be expected.

With my own redesign projects, I have found that about half the readers don’t want a thing changed in their newspaper, no matter what it is. Ever.  So finding readers who don’t like your design changes is not unusual, though I think 80 percent is a little high.

One of the most telling  comments came from a reader who said that each design change were sold as design “improvements,” such as more white space, larger photos and headlines and simply fewer pages. But they all basically meant less content.

Readers notice these things, and many are not happy. I have been railing against cutting back on content as a way to save money for years. It is like a race car driver deciding to make the engine smaller as a way to reduce weight. Uh, won’t that make you go slower? With newspapers: uh, won’t that make your paper less attractive to your core readers?

A number of readers said they were going to cancel their subscriptions, the ultimate measure of success or failure.

Design IS important, but we must never forget it is CONTENT that sells paper. Make sure your design changes improve your content, not just make your paper look better. Do your research. How do you do that? Next post!

Most journalists are writers. They think in and about words. Sure we have photojournalists and news artists, but the lingua franca of newspapers is the narrative. Every event should be covered by a story.

But the truth is the narrative, especially the traditional inverted-pyramid format, is good for some things and not so good for others.  Thus, the growing use of ALTs or Alternate Story Formats or ASFs or whatever the current nomenclature is. (Has anyone else noticed what a Tower of Babel we have in newspaper design terminology?)

Anyway, the high visual/low text approach of ASFs is certainly one good strategy to cover those events that lend themselves to a more list-like approach. Why waste time crafting a narrative when an ASF would achieve the same ends in an easier-to-digest, more visually interesting way?

Here is a brief little video about one such instance. For a larger-screened version, check out the version at the News Design School online newspaper design tutorials site.

alt-blog.swf

I used to think that small papers were better positioned to meet the challenges we are facing today in our industry.  Because they weren’t burdened by being part of a large newspaper group, because I thought they were thus more nimble, I believed that they could move quickly when technology dictated what they needed to do to succeed.

I am beginning to change my mind. What I see instead is that small newspapers are stretched so thin in terms of staff and revenue that it is hard to keep up with the changes in technology and the costs involved.

Software needs constant updating. The move to the web adds additional work each week.  It means that staff members have to learn new programs, and it means that they not only have to put up the paper each week, they have to move stories and photos to the web site.

Add to that fact that many journalists who run small newspapers are having a difficult time switching to the new paradigm of social networking websites and the like, and it’s no wonder that these are parlous times.

I don’t think we can fight the inevitable. We need to embrace the new technologies, new ways of doing things, and do the best we can to train our staffs to produce the best product for our new newspaper readers. The good news is that embracing some of the new technologies can save time and money. That’s what we need to focus on.

You simply must find the time to plug in to the brave new world of newspaper publishing.