When The Washington Post hits the streets on Inauguration Day, it will include a 38-page special section titled “Dawn of a Presidency” that chronicles “the long road Barack Obama, and his country, traveled to reach this moment.”
The cover, an oil painting by Daniel Adel, was commissioned by The Post to commemorate the occasion. We talked to The Post’s Jon Wile, who designed the section and had the idea to do the painting, about what it’s like to produce a paper that will surely have an eager audience. (Download a PDF of the cover here)
The Post will print close to a million copies of Tuesday’s paper alone.
Poynter’s Steve Myers noted in a piece last week that The Post “will publish a total of 1.72 million copies of morning and afternoon editions on Jan. 20 and 21, all for street sales, according to Mike Towle, director of retail and corporate sales.” That article also says the two-day run of The Post will total 2.7 million when home delivery copies are added in the mix.
Wile, who is also designing the paper’s special 160-page hardcover photo book that documents “the ceremony, the parade … moments public and private, and the inaugural balls,” took a few moments to talk to Update about the process. Wile also designed The Post’s record-selling Nov. 5 election front page.
Wile, who holds the Society’s regional director post for the East Coast metropolitan area, gave us his insight on being the designer behind the hottest news section in town in a brief interview on Monday evening in Washington.
Update: Whose idea was it to commission a painting? And how do you go about choosing the artist?
Wile: The oil painting was something that I had in mind before Election Day. I knew we wanted to do something that was going to be different that day, and I also knew that The Washington Post was going to be the paper in everyone’s hands as they watched the new president take office. We had to make a statement. The thought became a driver for everything we’d do.
I began working on ideas for what we might want to accomplish by visiting The National Portrait Gallery to see how presidents had been represented through the years, basically going back and doing visual archaeology on portraits. I came across two that struck me right away, one of George Washington and another of Lyndon Johnson, that fit the style I had envisioned. Not Abraham Lincoln, I know, but those were the ones I saved on my iPhone and showed to my colleagues in the newsroom to get the process started.
The Post’s art director, Dennis Brack, was a great sounding board. He helped me extend my ideas and began the process of fine-tuning how we might proceed. His experience was crucial.
Our biggest challenge, though, was finding an artist who would work on a tight budget and had an interest in doing something that would eventually appear on newsprint. That universe is small.
We approached one artist who told us he could not work on our timetable (obviously, we had to wait until after the election), another who, as we expected, was not thrilled with our medium, and then we finally settled on a person who could meet our requirements. That was Daniel Adel.
As we began working with the artist, we had several back-and-forth conversations about tone and what shape the painting should take. Daniel’s first sketches were challenging because he was working from reference material, not from a person sitting for the portrait. We went over the facial expression we needed to convey: serious and stern, without betraying Obama’s essential affable character.
Once we nailed that, we were in business. We started planning the section and Daniel began painting.
The final work arrived at The Post on Jan. 13.
As part of the contract, the artist kept the canvas (he actually stitched two together to get the scale he wanted) and we received a high-resolution image that we’d work on toning to get just right. That was trickier than you’d imagine. As we began the work on the image, we knew we’d have to work hard at making the subtleties of the original piece come through.
We’re running more than 900,000 copies of the section for distribution on Tuesday. We were worried that our presses would cause poor reproduction if we did not slow down the process from our normal daily speed, so we contacted advertising and production to see if we could run the press slower for better quality. They were amazing partners in the endeavor. They agreed. We ran the press slow over the last two days to get the best results.
And we now have a crisp section cover that, we hope, feels special to everyone who sees it.
Artist Daniel Adel’s original un-retouched stitched canvas.
Update: Knowing you’re designing an historic section for one of the world’s most-respected newspapers comes with a little pressure. How do you balance all the demands from everyone who wants to have a voice in the process?
Wile: The room at The Post is obviously large. Many people normally weigh in on important presentation decisions.
But we had the advantage on this one because there was a small team with a terrific editor: Mary Hadar. She was instrumental in helping us remove story starts from the cover, a rarity for The Post, finding the voice that would make the section authoritative, and elevating the focus for the cover.
We wanted classic Post style, which means there would need to be a formality about the cover. That was right in line with the oil painting.
We had many of The Post’s most high-profile writers in the section, so that would need to be something we advertised on the cover, as well as the index on the second page of the section.
Once we nailed the initial concept, we showed the sketches to Marcus Brauchli, The Post’s executive editor. Marcus liked the idea and he then let us run with it. That was, perhaps, not typical of the numbers of people who might normally vet something like this. The group was small and that worked in our favor.
Update: And, to that point, how do you design with history in mind?
Wile: We wanted something that would be uniquely Washington Post. We also wanted to have an approach that Washingtonians would immediately understand — the presidential oil painting, a symbol of the power of the office fit that bill.
We also made what I like to call a visual scoop. We talk in newsrooms a lot about reporters having scoops, but I genuinely believe that visual journalists can do the same thing.
With the world watching and our audience captivated by this story, we beat everyone else by giving them an official portrait of the new president. Obama’s “real one” won’t be made for some time yet, but you don’t have to wait for that. You’re able to get one on Tuesday by buying a copy of The Washington Post. Not a bad deal.
Matt Mansfield is president of the Society and an associate professor for the Medill School of Journalism.
What a wonderful back story about the birth of a beautiful idea. Folks are going to have to get up pretty early in the morning to find a copy of this collector’s edition. Congrats to Jon, Denny and the Washington Post team for stretching the visual limits while maintaining the Post’s timeless elegance.
Let me just get this straight. Your company is laying off good employees because of budget, and you decided to commission an oil painting of Obama. And how much exactly did that cost?
The Post has had zero layoffs in my four years here.
Great to see an “old-fashioned” technique like oil painting take such a prominent place in a modern newspaper. I noticed that some newspapers also use illustrations (watercolor, pastel drawings etc.) instead of all the (also great) photographs for Obama front pages on Jan. 20. I like that!
James has a point, though, even if there have been no layoffs.
So, pray tell, now that the Obama pages are behind us, what is the next gimmick that will save newspapers?
To echo Jon’s point: The Post has not laid anyone off since the Meyer family purchased the paper in the 1930s. We have had several rounds of buyouts, and our newsroom has contracted. At the same time, we have invested in critical areas. A historic presidential inauguration in our backyard is one of these.
There’s no reason not to say how much the project cost.
The continuing reluctance to provide this info raises some questions about the effectiveness of this approach.
There’s no reason for you to know how much the project cost, Robert. It’s an agreement between the Post and the artist. It’s not a matter of public record.
Again, I will tell you we were within what we usually pay an illustrator for a project like this. It would be comparable to what the NYT, LAT or paper of that size would pay for a full-page illustration.
Sorry you don’t feel that this was a worthwhile investment, but we are getting lots of requests to sell this page in poster form. And you can also see many people in the Tuesday inauguration crowd on the mall holding up the front during the festivities.
There’s no reason not to say how much it cost.
How would I know whether it’s a worthwhile investment? You say simply you have “lots of requests.” How many is lots? Also, I’m sure in your world that the concept of people holding up newspapers means they got them simply for the cover, but I can assure you that’s not the case. Using your logic, the people at basketball games buy programs simply for the design of the cover.
But if these approaches are so successful, as you claim, then why is there any hesitation to provide the numbers? Simply saying “it’s not a matter of public record” does not answer that question. It’s simply a way to state the obvious and to be evasive.
It’s the same game newspapers keep trying to play. They refuse to be transparent on these approaches, and then they try to use the lack of transparency as a defense, just as you are doing here.
But you keep clinging to what you’re saying. If you chant it long enough, it might make sense eventually. In the meantime, newspapers will have to wean themselves from the Obama poster pages. I’m sure the multitudes who flock to the newsstands simply for those images will be disappointed, but life must go on.
I am with the paper. Sorry, Robert. It is none of your business, nor mine, nor any one else apart from those responsible for the financials at the newspaper as to what the cost of the painting is. If the paper thinks it is a good business investment, so be it. That’s their opinion and probably a wise one at that.
Your snide comments at the Washington Post’s poster detract from a significant moment in U.S. history.
Bob Knilands, you are wasting your time worrying about the price of a freelance painting. A typical newspaper rate for a full page illustration is peanuts. You’re looking at anywhere from $750-$1,500. Enough of the conspiracy theories. All this proves is you take yourself way too seriously, more than anyone else probably would.
I am not saying people bought the paper for the design, but they will keep that page for the visual impact it reflects. Why do people hang up posters? Or buy artwork? What I did wasn’t more special than what others have done in the past, but we offered readers something they couldn’t get anywhere else on that day. We wanted them to understand this was not only a significant day in Washington, but all over the country. The painting, something we rarely do, offered that.
Sorry you don’t feel the same way. Sorry you don’t understand that visual journalism is important.
Actually, I think it’s the designers who take themselves too seriously. But you guys just keep thinking any threat to your groupthink seminars is a snide comment. It shows how things work in today’s dysfunctional newsrooms, where some people think an illustration of a stick figure clenching its head passes for business coverage. (One of those people has posted in its thread.)
Anyway, there’s no reason not to say how much it cost. If these design endeavors are really such a slam-dunk, then no one should have any problem revealing the cost/reward numbers.
Instead, we get evasiveness and the usual redefinition of terms. People with arguments offer responses. Designers redefine terms. Readers become viewers. Editing becomes designing. The act of drawing boxes and obsessing about elements becomes “visual journalism.” It’s really very sad.
The conversation in this thread does not seem to be useful. The same issue keeps getting batted back and forth. We’re closing the comments. Sorry, folks.