SND/Update

Fearlessness in the face of a scary time. Innovation alongside disruptive change. Human stories and out-of-this-world technology. New ideas and old fundamentals.

These are the threads that weave through a set of ideas from a formidable group of industry experts.

SND asked what’s ahead for news design in 2009. Looking into the crystal ball after one of the most dramatic years for the media is not easy, but the answers these journalists, teachers, consultants, artists and editors came back with have this in common:

Hope.

WHAT DO YOU SEE IN 2009?

Lee Abrams
Chief creative officer, Tribune Company

Staffs will be smaller, competition greater, local and global issues that are more complex and polar as well as a worsening economy will continue to hammer at our livelihood. With that said, 2009 will require both fearless journalism and fearless presentation as we need to continue to explore and experiment with new ways to engage the mainstream on today’s terms. Fearlessness is key as is the breakdown of barriers to finding the answers. Elitism, over-reliance on tradition and an unwillingness to aggressively rewrite the book will hamper the incredible opportunities that exist in times of crisis. We are no different and need to collectively attack the problems, invent the solutions and unleash our vision to inspire the pubic and deliver the goods in what promises to be a remarkable period of global craziness.

Mario Garcia
CEO and Founder, Garcia Media

During 2008 we saw consolidation of content among newspapers, better integration of online/print operations and a move toward narrower, more compact formats. In 2009 newspapers will pay more attention to enhance their weekend/Sunday editions, will experiment more aggressively with advertising, and mobile telephones will make strong headways as an integral part of a multi-platform newsroom environment.

Kris Viesselman
Director of Product Development, National Geographic Maps

We’ll continue to see a blending of visual storytelling techniques and an ever increasing value placed on broader skill sets. The discipline silos of the past will continue to erode. The most effective information designers will be engaged in unique reporting, focused writing and tight concept editing. Quality will be valued more than quantity in this time of limited space and attention spans. And, obviously, those who can visualize information/data across multiple platforms will lead this next wave of innovation.

Richard Koci Hernandez
Visiting Fellow at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism

2009 will mark the death of the video camera and the birth of the DSLR as the tool of choice for photojournalists. It would not surprise me if we see an independent film totally shot on a camera like the Canon 5D MarkII. It’s actually an amazing thing to have such a hybrid camera so soon. And they will only get better. I thought we would see these types of cameras in 2019, not 2009!

Andrew Savikas
Director of Publishing Technology at O’Reilly Media

While I’m pessimistic about the future of newspapers, I’m optimistic about the future of journalism. We often confuse the wine with the bottle in these discussions, and it’s hard to dispute that this is the best time in history to be a consumer of news (however you choose to define “news”). Filters are more important than ever before, and newsgathering organizations that survive to continue playing that role will realize that all writing and reporting is first and foremost writing for the Web, even if it might end up in print somewhere someday. They will also realize that rehashing the same story available from a thousand other sources wastes their resources and their readers’ time; the Web rewards linking - the more you send people away to great content, the more they return. News organizations need to reprogram their DNA away from the printed page, and design everything (including their business models and organizational structure) primarily for connected consumption.

Bonita Burton
Deputy managing editor, Orlando Sentinel
Vice President, Society for News Design

2009 will be an exciting year of reinvention. It will be the battleground year for news Web site design. Bikini photo galleries devised for quick clicks will give way to a more refined user experience. In print, design collaboration across markets will explode. Unholy alliances between competitors will become commonplace. There will be fewer design jobs, but more leadership opportunities for visual journalists with ambitious, experimental mindsets. Also, I predict Matt Mansfield will learn to sing “Summer Lovin’” in Spanish for SND/Buenos Aires.

Richard Curtis
Former deputy managing editor, USA Today, and SND founder

Challenges in 2009 (and beyond):

• How to serve readers with indispensable journalism that is rigorous, vital and sufficiently profitable.
• Developing a sustainable business strategy.
• Layoffs, consolidations, mergers.
• Newspapers going out of business.
• Burned out, overworked and demoralized newsroom staffs.
• Staying optimistic, not surrendering, looking for a clue.
• Giving HOPE to staffers every moment of every day.

This is probably more pessimistic than I really feel. Newspaper companies have absolutely huge obstacles in front of them. The ones still standing this time next year will be true innovators. Should be an exciting and — need I say this? — a very challenging year. Good thing to remember as we face these challenges: What we’ve been doing ain’t working all that well.

William Couch
Multimedia designer, USA Today

Two things immediately come to mind, although they’ll likely need to mature over more time than the next year, and these are probably shortsighted as is, but location-aware content and services, and mobile platforms.

In an earlier post, I outlined why I think mobile devices and platforms will be significant in the future, especially in terms of news and I think location-aware content and services will play an equally important and significant role. When you have a device that knows where you are, whether via GPS, cell-triangulation, wi-fi networks (i.e. iPhone) and data that has knowledge of its origin of creation, we’ll have an entirely new dimension through which we can observe the world around us. I think we’ve only begun to scratch the surface with this kind of data (having a mobile device tell you what restaurants are nearby based on cuisine preference [Yelp!, Urbanspoon], or equally, which of your friends are nearby [Brightkite, Loopt]).

Right now, the device best able to tie location data with content creation is a cell phone because obtaining the phone’s location is now often built-in with GPS/cell-triangulation capabilities, and this is most often seen with photos shot on a phone. When you email a photo from a location-aware device, like the iPhone to a service that supports geocoded data, like Flickr, you can immediately see where that content was created – in this case, where the photo was shot. Between auto-geocoded photos and user-geocoded photos, Flickr is now able to recreate the shapes of entire countries, down to city-specific neighborhoods because of this data. People are defining physical neighborhoods and boundaries through this geocoded data. Tom Taylor recently mined these “shapefiles” Flickr is able to create and made them searchable. Here, I performed a search on Bucktown, Chicago. Imagine the impact these perceptions of neighborhoods and regions could have on industries like real estate, or local news…

Earlier this fall, Mozilla released Geode, an attempt to bring that kind of location-aware data to the entire desktop browsing experience. When Geode came out, a friend and I were discussing a scenario in the future where, because the device you’re creating content on is location-aware, all of your content could have location data associated with it, and your computer’s operating system could adapt accordingly. Imagine you have a laptop that you use both at home and work. At work you have a well-defined set of applications, files and preferences you work with. When you’re at home, you likely have a varying set. If your OS knew where home and work were, and it were also aware of the computer’s location, it could change your setup and settings accordingly as you move between the places. This could translate to file creation too. In addition to “Created on” and “Modified on” properties, you could also have “Created at” and “Modified at” properties; files that know when and where you created them.

Personally, I remember a lot of things based on the location I was in, especially when hearing music for the first time. I think it would be fascinating to have that kind of data tied to files. Last.fm would be a great vehicle for this: “You first listened to Andrew Bird in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Most recently, you listened to Andrew Bird in Arlington, Virginia.” To me, that’s an entirely different but equally fascinating landscape to observe.

Svetlana Maximchenko
Editor in chief, Akzia, Moscow

I expect to see:

• Web influence print news design (more and more every year)
• Scores of infographics (and other graphics) about the financial crisis (to May or to September every traditional view of the news or features about the crisis will be finished and news editors/designers will have to invent something new)
• The beginning of influence on news design in the United States and European Union from Argentina, Brazil, China, and maybe Russia
• And I hope to see a lot of young, talented and excited people in the industry from all over the world.

David Kordalski
AME/Visuals, The Plain Dealer

With space dwindling, print photography needs to be assigned and edited ever more smartly for impact. But a new era of visual storytelling will blossom as more still shooters embrace the transition to video and multimedia.

Upstatement’s recommendations for Newspaper Success:
www.upstatement.com

• Build a wall around the internet, maintain zone of profitability until townsfolk learn to Twitter via Morse code.
• Scratch and sniff inks, because you want to know what bad news smells like.
• Get creative with distribution methods: Why not print the news on slices of toast? No waste, just delicious crumbs of information.
• Playoffs: like layoffs but more fun.

Kevin Wendt
Editor, the Huntsville Times

Editors will eliminate layers between reporter and publication – both in print and online – to retain as many content-generators and information-distributors as possible.

Jeremy Gilbert
Assistant professor, Medill School of Journalism, Northwestern University

Journalism schools are facing similar challenges to the news industry. What skills and tools should they teach? Where will new graduates and alumni be able to practice their craft? However the proximity of skilled computer science programs offers a unique opportunity. In 2009, journalists will start to see incubation of new media companies from journalism schools. Rather than turning out graduates for old media organizations, look for collaborations with computer scientists to yield impressive results.

Alan Jacobson
Brass Tacks Design

The economy may improve in 2009, but this improvement won’t undo the secular changes that have undermined newspapers’ revenue models.

So newspapers will continue the staff-reducing trend that began in 2008: consolidating news gathering and news production with sister papers and even competing papers.

The best defense is a good offense. To remain viable, newspapers must develop better revenue models for print and new revenue models online. Newspaper designers always have ideas. They should contribute to this development effort.

Readership-boosting strategies are no longer enough. Publishers will reward those forward-looking journalists who discover how to monetize online journalism.

In 2009, newspaper pages will be smaller, newspapers will publish fewer pages and fewer newspapers will publish at all.

And with newspapering moving to the web, how many newspaper designers do we really need? Should colleges even be teaching this stuff?

Clearly, newspaper design is not a growth industry.

Al Trivino
Editorial art director, new projects, News International

• 1. New platform: the newsbook. A publishing conglomerate, a software/hardware developer and a telecommunication company will join forces to create a new digital media where to read, view, listen to, share and store newspapers, magazines and books. It should retain the rationale behind reading and browsing in print.

• 2. Total design. Editorial creative directors will get involved in ad campaigns to deliver both editorial and publicity contents to a right target without damaging the integrity of the brand. Free-newspapers/magazines will keep leading the way — they have already walked that route and know some rights and wrongs about innovation in sales.

• 3. Content fragmentation. Both in print and online the industry moves toward a text or image-only driven presentation - infographic, picture or video-only. The golden times of Life magazine are back. There is a chance to rediscover and invent visual journalistic genres -photo or video essays/profiles/interviews/news in brief. A picture will still be worth a thousand words, and a word will be worth a thousand pictures as well.

Anders Tapola
Sub-editor, Smalandsposten, Sweden
President, SND/Scandinavia

2009 will be the year:

• When many more free papers are born.
• When the circulation of newspapers will dip again - more than ever before.
• When the Internet will be much stronger as the major source for information.
• When social networks will be even more important.
• When more lay-offs than ever before will happen in our business.
• When big companies will buy smaller ones - just to survive.
• When almost everyone becomes his or her own media producer.
• When we say that the newspapers are going to die a painful death.
• When we also say that we must do something radical to save the newspapers. And we still almost believe what we are saying.
• And that’s a big challenge that I still think we can handle.
• And it will also be the year when the biggest headline will be: Peace in The Middle East!
• So: A Happy New Year to all of you!

Gayle Grin
Managing Editor, Design and Graphics, The National Post
Immediate Past President, Society for News Design

What do I see ahead in 2009? My mission as president this year was to reach out to SND’s global membership. Through presentations in Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Paris, Moscow and Shanghai I realized how big SND really is. I was truly inspired by the enthusiasm for SND by the designers I met.

There has been a renaissance for design in some places. Papers in Russia, China, India, Abu Dhabi and Dubai, for example, are emerging in visual journalism and as design leaders. In some countries in the past, politics did not support opinion and commentary so these papers have readers very hungry to read, too.

Another visible trend is the use of illustration to interpret the news. This was very apparent at the SND competition in 2008. We are very used to illustration with feature stories. As newspapers become more analytical we need visuals which are thoughtful and interpretative. Especially internationally, I saw illustrations used on comment and opinion pages as well as the front page. As North American papers are becoming more risk-taking this past year, we will see this trend help vitalize North American papers.

For the most part, internationally, the integration of print and online was seamless. Readers will get their information in any medium it suits them at the moment — whether that be online, newsprint, magazine, radio, or television. Newspapers across the world will continue to break away from the ‘print-first’ thinking and will plan across many medias.

Another facet of a strong international SND is a broader perspective. Currently newspapering in North America is having a major identity crisis, but by looking beyond the North American shores we see newspapers thriving in other parts of the world.

I trust that SND will continue to grow internationally and, in doing so, continue to build on the great potential for global cross-pollination in design.

After more than a decade of increasing concerns and warnings about the impending doom of print journalism, 2008 turned out to be the year the sky actually was falling in on American newspapers.

Looking back on the year in an article in The Toronto Star, Ryan Bigge wrote, “Newspapers struggled to disprove media guru Jeff Jarvis’s claim that print is dead.”

Print may be far from dead, but clearly declining profits and changing reader habits have captured the industry’s attention in a big way.

As we wrote in yesterday’s post, it was the year of the layoff. Newspapers cut more than 15,000 jobs in 2008. Many papers and chains did multiple rounds of layoffs over the course of the year.

It was a year where things that once seemed unthinkable became cold, hard reality.

Tribune, which has had financial issues since its purchase of Times Mirror several years ago, found itself in an even more precarious financial situation after Sam Zell’s purchase last year. Zell has said in interviews that his purchase of the company has been “the deal from hell.” And as the industry and nation’s economy has cratered, Zell has cut hundreds of jobs and pages from all the chain’s papers.

By early December rumors of a possible bankruptcy filing surfaced. Within days the filing was made, making many nervous about the economic viability of even the biggest chains.

This past summer, Newark’s Star-Ledger clarified Newhouse’s long-held job security pledge. Then, a couple of months later, the paper and its parent company warned that if 200 employees didn’t agree to a buyout and if the paper couldn’t reach agreements with unions representing drivers and mailers, the paper would be sold or possibly closed.

A couple months later, Jim Romenesko posted a memo from Star-Ledger publisher George Arwady that said, “Since it is doubtful that the Drivers will ratify an agreement by October 8, 2008, we will be sending formal notices to all employees this week, as required by both federal and New Jersey law, advising you that the Company will be sold, or, failing that, that it will close operations on January 5, 2009.”

Both unions agreed to concessions. It was a measure that saved the paper. For now.

A bad time for newspapers

Last spring, Tribune, looking for cash, sold Newsday to Cablevision for more than $600 million. By summer many analysts were wondering if such a sale could have been repeated.

By then newspapers became a much tougher sale as it became harder and harder to put a value on properties as both the nation’s economy and the future of print became more and more questionable.

Whether it was a new financial prudence or buyers already laden with too much debt, newspaper properties that would have had no trouble finding suitors in the past couldn’t close the deal.

One of those jewels sitting out on the market was The San Diego Union-Tribune. A property long coveted by chains like Hearst, the U-T finally went on the market in July and ended the year without a buyer.

The Pulitzer-winning Rocky Mountain News was put up for sale in early December after $11 million in losses in nine months this year. According to the New York Times, Rich Boehne, president and chief executive of the E. W. Scripps Company, had told a stunned newsroom if nobody bought the Rocky by mid-January, Scripps would consider closing the paper.

A cover story about the paper’s sale in Denver’s alt weekly Westword contained the headline, “What are the odds that someone will buy the Rocky? Microscopic and none.” While speculation remains that the paper will be shuttered in the first quarter of 2009, there’s been no official decision on the Rocky’s fate from Scripps.

The Landmark chain did manage to sell its Weather Channel, but put up and pulled back all its newspaper properties, including the Virginian Pilot and Roanoke Times. The company said they would try again to sell their newspaper assets when the credit crunch eased.

In an article announcing the move in late October, newspaper analyst John Morton told the Pilot, “The market is awash in sellers and no buyers. Right now it’s the credit, but it wasn’t happening before the credit tied up. People are very leery. They’re not sure what they should pay or how well the newspapers are going to come out of the recession they’ve been in.”

It will be a while before we see how newspapers weather the recession. The news out of Detroit and from retailers this holiday season make the ad outlook for 2009 look even more bleak.

The economic predictions for early 2009 are a harsh extension of what this year brought. More layoffs, more bankruptcies and, most likely, the outright shuttering of some major properties.

In her post “Pragmatic Media Predictions for 2009,” Diane Mermigas predicts:

“Many individual and group TV and newspaper properties will collapse under the weight of an advertising recession and legacy costs. Their online and other digital revenues will fail to offset double-digit ad losses. Loan covenants and debt payments will be missed. Some will shut down; a few will sell off in a dismal deal market.”

But Mermigas and others see the possibility that if newspapers take this opportunity to smartly reinvent their products and change their economic models, they could emerge with more value on the other side.

Others, such as Edward Roussel, argue that there’s little to be done about the current economic situation except to focus on the future. “The best approach for battle-weary media executives may be to let the fire run its course—however counterintuitive that might seem. That’s partly because there is little the newspaper industry can do to stop the advancing flames. But it’s also because today’s obsession with saving newspapers has meant that, for the most part, media companies have failed to plan adequately for tomorrow’s digital future. The economic downturn has added to the urgent need for a change of direction.”

And, of course, we all take hope in a tidbit gleaned from a post on LAObserved that’s also been widely reported elsewhere: While talking about the rumor of further layoffs at the Los Angeles Times, editor Russ Stanton “offered the tidbit that revenue from LATimes.com now exceeds the cost of the paper’s editorial payroll.”

Now that’s something to hang on to in the new year — an inkling of where you might start placing your bets.

A good time to innovate

With adversity comes the chance for the new, the untried, the innovative.

That means many newsrooms (not all) will have to overcome the institutional inertia that has held them back until now, a mindset that has not only not dealt well with change but actively combats it.

To quote The Talking Heads, “Well, how did we get here?” And, to paraphrase many a media observer, how do we get beyond it?

The problem in too many places has been a clinging to the past that’s borderline mental. It’s stunningly myopic to live in the world we do and not notice the changes in media consumption, the ones that are putting in peril that thing you do every day.

It’s true: The road ahead can certainly be informed by what came before. It’s foolish not to consider the lessons we have learned. That is, as long as we’re learning. The real chance to break free of those constraints, though, can only come by realizing that the good old days are both behind us and not as rosy as those rose-colored glasses might lead some to believe.

The good news? There are more jobs and opportunities for journalists than ever before.

That’s if we can get over how it used to be.

As people who have tried to help news organizations see the path ahead, visual journalists need to be visionary in getting over it all: the space we used to have, the perks we used to enjoy, the privilege and entitlement that came from years of generous newshole and technological advances that made our crafts seemingly indispensable as newspapers marched into the future.

And we have to get over the jobs that have gone away. Many of them are never coming back – at least not as they had been constructed in the past.

Journalism isn’t going away, though.

The skills we all have are more valuable than ever. But we may be using those skills at start-ups or smaller news organizations — or for ourselves — instead of for that giant news organization we grew up thinking was the last word in being in a success. It’s not that dream anymore.

What we also must give up on is seeing journalism as tied only to print on paper.

Believe us, that’s a painful thing to say from a couple of people who love print design, its grace and beauty. Photojournalism. Information graphics. Sections that soar, that make you cry, or laugh. How a broadsheet doubletruck canvas can help convey emotion, how the ability to study a still image at that size has immense power. We have seen print work its magic many times in our long careers. We know it has a role in the journalism that comes next.

“Internationally, the integration of print and online has been rather seamless,” said Gayle Grin of The National Post, who is concluding her term as the Society’s president today. “Readers will get their information in any medium it suits them at the moment – whether that be online, newsprint, magazine, radio, or television. Newspapers across the world will continue to break away from the ‘print-first’ thinking and will plan across many medias. In North America, papers made a huge effort to try new things they normally would not have. Design and presentation are going through radical change to reach readers.”

It is our greatest hope that print design will be thriving for a long time – in new, exciting ways that are richly experimental with story forms and structures, even what days the paper is delivered (if it is delivered at all). There are positive signals around the world for growth in newspapering. Those signs are indeed heartening.

Yet we also know that the future includes far more than print, and we know we’re lucky it does because it enriches our tool box as storytellers. We see how multimedia has changed the definition of what it means to be a photojournalist or graphic artist or designer working today. We also see entirely new jobs being created: Programmers and developers are contributing to the field as many news organizations get smart about ease of use and interaction.

And we have see how journalists are partnering with people outside the profession to create new kinds of stories, ones that are told because the authoring function has been so widely distributed. There’s technical skill in the hands of far more people because we’re all used to making content. The community we see being built by this collaboration makes us understand the important role journalism has to play as a gathering spot for ideas about the world around us. Not a new concept at all, really.

We’re confident our colleagues who pioneered the way for visual journalism at newspapers will be willing to step up to innovate for other forms of delivery. Many of the Society’s members already have, of course. We wrote about several triumphs as we looked back at what helped to define 2008.

We also witness it daily with the evolution of our craft, the changes in the teaching we do, the kinds of things we talk about at our annual workshop, and, increasingly, in the type of work we celebrate.

You make the change you deserve. We believe visual journalists deserve amazing roles in the innovation ahead. Here’s to being part of the solution in 2009.

To help: On New Year’s Day we will feature advice, analysis and predictions for what to expect in 2009. Update talked to Mario Garcia, Lee Abrams, Gayle Grin, Richard Curtis, Alan Jacobson, Richard Koci Hernandez, Kris Viesselman, Svetlana Maximchenko, Bonita Burton, Andrew Savikas, David Kordalski, and many others about what’s around the corner. It’s a good jump start to seeing beyond the wreckage and looking for ways to build. So get ready to hit that reset button.

2008: The Year in News Design

• No. 2: Layoffs, buyouts change the face of design

• No. 3: Redesigns roll out at a stunningly fast pace

• No. 4: Embracing our social, microlocal world

• No. 5: Print news design thrives around the world

• No. 6: Multimedia and interactives grow up

• No. 7: The Obama effect – A big event moves papers

• No. 8: New skills emerge as newsrooms evolve

• No. 9: Untangling the migration to mobile

• No. 10: Is the best design really outside the U.S.?

There’s no getting around it: 2008 was the year of the layoff.

The forecast was already grim for U.S. newspapers. We all know the story of sliding circulation, increased competition online and the rapid reduction in revenue.

Then, when the economy tanked, it suddenly got worse for news organizations. The method of choice for handling the financial crisis quickly became cutting payroll.

By Erica Smith’s count on her running log called “Paper Cuts,” newspapers lost more than 15,586 jobs in 2008. That’s a number that does not include other news organizations. That’s just newspapers.

No one was immune

The nation’s most-respected titles cut journalists. Even the large national players – The New York Times, The Washington Post, USA Today, and the Los Angeles Times – joined the major metros and small-circulation papers in shedding staff. Tribune and Gannett went chain-wide. The quest for cost-savings was on.

At the San Jose Mercury News, where I was an editor for the last eight years, the news staff was down to about 175 when I took a buyout in March. The Merc became a poster child for the epic highs and lows facing papers of similar size. At the height of the dot-com peak in 2000, the paper boasted a news staff of close to 450. Some fall.

We were far from alone in Silicon Valley, though. Plenty of the country’s best designers left their daily newspaper jobs, some by choice but many more by being laid off.

The face of news design began changing quickly, in probably the most significant way since pagination swept into newsrooms nearly three decades ago. Amazing talent has simply taken off, reluctant to weather yet another storm in the name of journalism. Designers have fled to other, safer enterprises.

‘It’s the best time to be a news designer’

But, as we mentioned in earlier posts for this Year in News Design review, the layoffs and buyouts have brought with them a new set of opportunities. Change begets change.

We’re not being disingenuous when we say we believe it’s the best time to be a news designer. (Whether it feels like that or not.)

The new skills that news organizations need are exactly suited to design thinking. The revolution that designers were able to stage nearly 30 years ago, well, that’s exactly the kind of information revolution that’s happening now. That conversation about presentation has begun happening with online interfaces and extends to the print products of the future, though we know they won’t be the behemoth papers of the past.

Seeing the way, prototyping and iterating toward news goals, has always been the unique contribution that design makes in helping make complex information easier to understand.

Now, more than at maybe any other point in our craft’s history, design has a crucial role in shaping how journalism looks and feels moving into other forms of delivery. Revolutionary thinking has begun to take root in design for online and mobile devices.

It’s an exciting moment as new tools allow pioneering ways to tell stories.

We’re on the brink of major breakthroughs in news design, many of which we have seen start to fertilize this year. There are many more to come.

The path ahead can be forged – like it was three decades ago when the Society’s founding members saw a need for advancing the conversation – by people smart enough to see how design matters.

Trust us, design matters now more than ever.

2008: The Year in News Design

• No. 3: Redesigns roll out at a stunningly fast pace

• No. 4: Embracing our social, microlocal world

• No. 5: Print news design thrives around the world

• No. 6: Multimedia and interactives grow up

• No. 7: The Obama effect – A big event moves papers

• No. 8: New skills emerge as newsrooms evolve

• No. 9: Untangling the migration to mobile

• No. 10: Is the best design really outside the U.S.?

An amazing year for quick-turnaround redesigns

As the economic footing for U.S. newspapers began crumbling even faster in 2008, it seemed something else was gaining speed as well: the pace of redesigns.

With several dozen U.S. redesigns launching last year, most seemed to be done more quickly than we’re used to seeing. And while economic decisions have often been the driver of redesigns in the past, the pace of layoffs, section collapsing and newsprint savings demanded a quicker response from those doing the redesigns.

“I think speed was a big thing,” said Michael Whitley, assistant managing editor for design at the Los Angeles Times, which launched its own redesign in late October. “Most redesigns are a nine month or a year process. Many of the 2008 redesigns can be measured in weeks not months.”

The common theme across most projects seemed to be doing more design in less space and doing it with fewer people.

And, after a few years of obfuscation for readers watching their papers shrink, it seemed to be the year of the more transparent redesign. It was clearer that much of what we were doing was responding to our changing organizations.

In his column accompanying the launch of the Knoxville News Sentinel in November, editor Jack McElroy said that the changes “frankly, are intended to reduce costs.”

Let the consolidation begin

“Some of the smaller paper projects seemed to be driven by a desire on the part of the chain owner to consolidate design and editing operations,” said Charles Apple, who chronicled nearly 30 redesigns on his Visual Editors blog beginning with David Dombrowski’s in-house effort on the Wisconsin State Journal right after the first of the year.

Apple also points, correctly, to the market reasons behind some redesigns. “In other cases, (it was) to format the hell out of the paper, to reduce the choices designers can make in order to make production work more cheaply. And, of course, you had a number of redesigns – at papers big and small – aimed at combining sections, at eliminating various features and at making it easier to reduce staff.”

And while consultants were still busy in the international market, another economic indicator of the U.S. redesign markets was the number of efforts that stayed solely in-house. “Many papers weren’t going to spend the money on the outside expertise,” said Bonita Burton, deputy managing editor of the Orlando Sentinel and incoming vice president of SND.

But that’s not to say all newspapers. Several did look to outside expertise.

In the flurry of summer redesigns, Alan Jacobson’s Wyoming Tribune Eagle and Garcia Media’s The Oklahoman were two consultant-led redesigns, for example.

What about content changes?

Even in the push to redesign quickly, content decisions still appeared to be getting serious consideration.

“In the redesign of the Orlando Sentinel, content was being evaluated in a really rigorous way,” Burton said.

The Sentinel launched their redesign in June, the first of the coordinated corporate effort that swept up all Tribune papers over the summer and fall. An early June “Talk to Sam” memo from Sam Zell told employees companywide that redesigns at every paper were coming but also that the company “will be assuming a 50/50 ad-to-editorial ratio base as a floor to right-size our papers.”

Zell went on to say, “We must find the balance between producing excellent products and producing products we can afford. And, we will find it.”

While corporate design directives are not new (Gannett comes quickly to mind), Tribune’s push to redesign so many large papers so quickly did feel extraordinary. And, perhaps to some outside the process, like a bit of a sideshow.

“A lot of papers were already thinking about redesigning and Lee Abrams came in and rocket fueled the conversation. I really do believe it began with a desire from the new owners to make the products more contemporary,” Burton said. “It collided with the economics, which sped up the timetable. It was exhausting and invigorating to do something on that scale in such a short amount of time.”

Was the shorter window necessarily a bad thing?

There are those who thought that redesigns that we born after long gestation periods tended to be more etched in stone. This year’s economic conditions and speed created a redesign more likely to constantly evolve.

“The market challenges allowed you to do some things more easily than you could before,” said Jonathon Berlin, the design and graphics editor at the Chicago Tribune, which also redesigned this year. “Sometimes the conditions you can’t do anything about break walls down and allow you to try something different.”

On that subject, Burton added, “You can avoid paralysis by analysis when it’s in such a short window.”

Whatever good came from the processes of this year’s class of redesigns, there are no shortage of skeptics, of course, wondering if any of these efforts will make much of a difference. Apple said, “I think we saw very few redesigns aimed at doing anything for the reader. Several seemed to be aimed at helping out the stockholders, though.”

And while Apple was generally very complimentary of all the individual Tribune efforts, there was no shortage of critics locally and nationally as Zell’s papers are very much under the microscope.

On his Visual Editors page, Jim McBee asked an even bigger question: Aren’t the 2008 class of redesigns just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic? “I think the innovation needs to come in developing completely new products, and on the sales side,” he wrote. “We need to redesign the industry more than we need to redesign our pages or even our newsrooms.”

Where this all leads in 2009 remains to be seen. It’s definitely going to be another busy year.

Right off, we have a couple of very interesting contrasts to study. The deliberate, far-reaching transformation effort that has been going on at the Atlanta Journal Constitution for some time is set to debut relatively early in the year. And the two Detroit papers will undertake a radical new delivery schedule that will require some fresh design thinking in the first quarter.

VIDEO INTERVIEWS WHEN THE REDESIGNS LAUNCHED
Michael Whitley of the Los Angeles Times,
and Steve Cavendish of the Chicago Tribune

Q+A WITH TWO TRIBUNE DESIGN CHIEFS
Michael Whitley of the Los Angeles Times,
and Jonathon Berlin of the Chicago Tribune

Update: Almost all redesigns have an economic reason…Coverage changes to adjust to reader/advertiser opportunities; web width reductions; sectioning changes. So an economic driven redesign is not new. But what was different about this year’s crop of redesigns in the U.S. in terms of business/money driving the effort?

Michael Whitley: I think there is tremendous pressure to reverse the fortunes of newspapers with a fresh design. Its funny how a bad economy can suddenly bring to light areas where you might not have not kept up with the rest of the world.

Economic pressures have for sure collectively given newspaper designers more opportunity to change things than we would have been given during a stronger period in newspaper history. As an industry we have a tendency to go from “we refuse to participate” to a “we will be the best at…” stance on anything new or different. And we have a reluctance to evolve and improve when things are going well – probably the best time to consider changes that will improve our products.

I think the hard truth is design cannot solve the economic problems we are all facing. We can and should make our products better, and work to keep them relevant. And I am glad we made most of the changes we did. But I don’t think that alone will save us.

Jonathon Berlin: So it’s hard to find the positives in the last few years, but one thing the economic crisis has brought is change — I think we’ve seen newspapers try things that they normally wouldn’t have. Things that were sacred before for no particular reason are no longer that way. Papers are trying new ways to reach people.

Web width reduction forces designers to make different decisions in page structure and furniture. And while newspapers have never been that great at taking things away, smaller news hole forces new editing decisions.

I would also say that the big challenge in all of this is figuring out how to make a newspaper that readers can’t pass by. Design can help do this.

Update: Was there anything else that marked redesigns in 2008? Lack of consultant-led redesigns? Speed?

Michael Whitley: I think speed was a big thing. Most redesigns are a nine month or a year process. Many of the 2008 redesigns can be measured in weeks not months. It probably saved us from over thinking parts of it but it also meant decisions were made at light speed. It left us with the beginning of something, not the end finished result. What we launched with was a framework for building on going forward. From here I think we still fill in the things that would have been more complete on a longer timeline.

Not using outside consultants forced us to think more like them. There is a natural tendency to be attached, even defensive about your own work. Good consultants can look at what you do in a more detached way and in the past have helped people make a lot more progress than they could have on their own.

But since we were doing so much of this in house, we all had to be a little more detached to push things forward. We still used experts for some thing. Font Bureau for work on our typography, Jim Parkinson to redraw the nameplate…

It’s still good to use experts when you can.

Jonathon Berlin: I think things have been moving so quickly that the notion of a long, thought-out redesign has given way to constant adjustment. This is a good thing for newspapers. A Trib leader likes to talk about product development as a cycle of growth, plateau and decline. Other products whether detergent or breakfast cereal make big changes as they plateau and decline. They change packaging, marketing, parts of their core product. Newspapers, for one reason or another, haven’t done this very well.

The basic makeup of a daily is changing in front of our eyes forcing us to reevaluate every news decision we make. If we can stay strategic, keep our editing wits about us, hold on to the pieces of the craft that are most essential and valuable, what comes out of this will be better for customers and the money should follow.

Update: Corporate design decisions are nothing new (think Gannett), but we can’t really remember a chain getting such a push for different redesigns all at the same time. What was good about that? Bad?

Michael Whitley: The good is you can get the push you need to get things finished. We’ve been adjusting and evolving the design of the LA Times for nearly seven years and several leaders in starts and stops and that left the paper disjointed from section to section. We saw this as the opportunity to bring the whole paper together under one set of styles and augment and refine the work we had already done. So the push was good in that regard.

I think the toughest part was making sure to keep focused on our individual identities. Redesigning so many publications so close together had the potential to produce a oneness of thought – results that were more generic and we would all just do the same thing. But I think each publication was able to hear ideas and figure out how they would work or not work for readers in that market. It also meant a lot of ideas were coming up. Sort of an intellectual jam session. So you had a lot of ideas to chose from from a lot of bright people, not just what you thought of at your paper. And it was up to you to take the best of it for your market.

Jonathon Berlin: I think what the Tribune company has done in the past year is a pretty big deal. Unfortunately it’s been going on against the backdrop of some really hostile economics, so the positive change made across the country gets left behind. They basically came around to each paper in the chain and said: make a change that readers will notice, that fits your area. Five years ago this would have been the biggest splash in the pool, right now it all gets drowned out as we figure out how to get through the first few months of the year. Take a look at the work done in Fort Lauderdale, Baltimore, Orlando, Hartford, Chicago, LA. All these places really pushed hard to go to market with something bold, new, journalistic.

Update: Michael, most of the Tribune papers had a fairly dramatic look coming out of their redesigns, which was not the case in Los Angeles. Obviously this was a careful and conscious decision on the part of your leadership. In fact, it was more of a typographical refinement and section reorganization rather than a full-blown redesign. What was your thinking inside the LAT? What was the reaction from Chicago?

Michael Whitley: A big part of what we did was a philosophical redesign – really rethinking what boldness meant for the LAT. Its something you see especially in the Sunday paper and in the best journalism we put into the daily paper. We expanded the range. We also refined our typography and made a lot of small improvements to thinks that readers have wanted and asked for while, while making sure to keep some of the basic DNA of the Times. Keeping stories organized and making the typography simple and elegant was crucial. Our goal was a fresh take on a product with over 125 years of history. I think we accomplished that. Dramatic change can be a matter of perspective, and this is a pretty bold leap forward for the Times.

I think it would be fair to say our leadership in Chicago considers this a step in the right direction and that we all agree we need to see more of our best moments on a daily basis. But you can’t force it. It has to be real and worth it to mean anything to our readers.

Update: Jonathon, you’ve worked on a number of redesign projects. What was different about the Chicago Tribune? Clearly some sacred cows were cleared (the blue nameplate, for example). But there must have been some other things that felt extraordinary this time around.

Jonathon Berlin: We basically did away with all the sacred cows and set out to design a paper for 2008. We moved really fast, so we’re looking at the redesign as more of a starting point than an end point. A place where we start making real change. We didn’t want anything to be sacred and church-like as it was before.

 That being said, the thing that probably is most different, way beyond the sectioning changes and new fonts, is the new way of thinking about the paper: We’re thinking about engaging our audience rather than being ruled by a set of sometimes odd old-fashioned rules of newspapering. While we still have a lot to do, I think we’ve made big steps in this direction.

2008: The Year in News Design

• No. 4: Embracing our social, microlocal world

• No. 5: Print news design thrives around the world

• No. 6: Multimedia and interactives grow up

• No. 7: The Obama effect – A big event moves papers

• No. 8: New skills emerge as newsrooms evolve

• No. 9: Untangling the migration to mobile

• No. 10: Is the best design really outside the U.S.?

A distinct thread in online news last year revolved around the idea of connecting people — to each other, to the reporters in the newsroom, to what was happening down the block. A few of the most innovative changes to the social landscape of journalism in 2008:

• We mentioned Twitter in our year-end review of mobile news, but it’s worth mentioning again because it’s been the glue that helped breaking news spread, connected journalists and gave readers another pathway for feedback. Erica Smith’s excellent round-up of newspapers that use Twitter is a reminder of how quickly and widely this relatively new service has spread in traditional newsrooms.

• 2008 kicked off with the launch of the Knight-funded EveryBlock, which redefined how local news could be aggregated and displayed in an extremely granular format. Adrian Holovaty joined with a small team of developers and designer Wilson Miner and since January they’ve expanded from Chicago, New York and San Francisco to Boston, Charlotte, Los Angeles, Miami, Philadelphia, San Jose, Seattle and Washington, DC. Holovaty called the site’s ethos “microlocal” in it’s mission to answer the question, “What’s happening in my neighborhood?”

• David Cohn, also with funding from the Knight Foundation, launched Spot.us, which attempts to create an alternative, community-centric approach to assigning and funding journalism. Cohn worked with the crew at Hashrocket to build an innovative site that creates a marketplace between passionate citizens and interested journalists. They’ve already funded and completed four stories, from fact-checking local campaigns to issues of water contamination. It’s also worth checking out the behind the scenes of the design process.

• ReportingOn.com, started by Ryan Sholin and funded by the Knight Foundation (notice a trend?), the site is built to connect journalists working on the same topics to share knowledge and tips. It’s the first social network that revolves around beats.

Notably, these four projects were built outside newsrooms and designed to empower journalists across the spectrum (from community bloggers to full-time reporters). It’s a trend we can expect to continue — especially when you read through predictions for 2009 solicited by David Cohn.

2008: The Year in News Design

• No. 5: Print news design thrives around the world

• No. 6: Multimedia and interactives grow up

• No. 7: The Obama effect – A big event moves papers

• No. 8: New skills emerge as newsrooms evolve

• No. 9: Untangling the migration to mobile

• No. 10: Is the best design really outside the U.S.?

Some great news for print

The news was bad for struggling papers in the United States and Canada, but the global view on print was markedly different. In fact, newspapers are thriving around the world.

“It’s a renaissance for design in some places,” said Gayle Grin, the Society’s president. “You see the beautiful work that these papers are doing, and you know that (design) still has amazing power. It’s truly inspirational.”

As part of her mission to reach out to SND’s global membership, Grin traveled the world this year to meet designers who are making a difference. She made stops in Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Paris, Moscow, and Shanghai in 2008.

A new chapter in China

The Society established SND-Chinese earlier this year to help fill the growing thirst for news design in China. The chapter is now headed by Lily Lu and was started by Alan Jin.

The first major event the Society hosted with emerging Chinese visual journalists focused on how to visually present the Beijing Olympics. Chris Courtney, from Red Eye, and Greg Manifold, from The Washington Post, joined Grin at the workshop to share ideas and best practices for covering such a major event.

“It was so exciting to have open paths of communication and interaction between visual journalists on this international level,” Grin said.

Growth around the globe

Earlier this year, BusinessWeek wrote about how German newspapers are bucking the trend.

Staunchly gray Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung risked alienating readers by printing color photos on the front page and launched a sassy Sunday edition. The measures helped stop a slide in readership. Die Welt created a tabloid edition that helped lure younger readers. And the papers dared to raise prices. Even Bild, aimed at a working-class audience, in July boosted its newsstand price by 20%, to about 90 cents in most markets. The hikes, along with digital revenue, helped offset the loss in ads.

According to figures released this year by the World Association of Newspapers, Germany is not alone: Newspaper sales in Brazil increased by some 12% last year. Over the past five years, circulation has gone up by more than 22%.

Seven of the 10 best-selling daily newspapers in the world are in Asia. The five biggest markets for newspapers are: China (98.7 million copies sold daily), India (88.9 million), Japan (69.1 million), the U.S. (52.3 million), and Germany (21.1 million), according to the WAN report.

The growth trend is also continuing in papers committed to using design thinking as part of their overall strategy.

In the United Arab Emirates, there’s a new start-up paper in Abu Dhabi that uses bold design: The National. The English-language daily published its first issue on April 17.

In Dubai, The Gulf News continues to do beautiful presentation, winning more and more Best of Newspaper Design™ awards for its stunning work. (Check out the work of Douglas Okasaki for an example.)

In fact, The Society’s Best of Newspaper Design™ competition saw a record number of entries from outside North America last year.

And there are more and more successes in other places.
Have a great story? Please share yours in the comments.

2008: The Year in News Design

• No. 6: Multimedia and interactives grow up

• No. 7: The Obama effect – A big event moves papers

• No. 8: New skills emerge as newsrooms evolve

• No. 9: Untangling the migration to mobile

• No. 10: Is the best design really outside the U.S.?

Multimedia and interactive projects continued their rapid evolution in 2008, becoming more central to the storytelling process in newsrooms of every size. It is these types of undertakings that underscore Jeff Jarvis’ proclamation: “The building block of journalism is no longer the article.”

This year saw projects with incredible breath and depth, incorporating a spectrum of technologies and storytelling methods. In addition to the obvious maturation and mastery evident in these approaches, another noticeable trend is the impact of development frameworks, particularly Django and Ruby on Rails — proving their ability to respond to news deadlines when placed in capable hands.

Browsing some crowd favorites at interactivenarratives.org and combing through the bookmarks of Andrew DeVigal, Will Sullivan, Richard Koci Hernandez, Bill Couch, Zach Wise and many others — here are some of the highlights of 2008:

• “Mexico Under Siege” from the The Los Angeles Times weaves together dozens of stories, interactive maps, video, and slide shows into an aggressive news-driven design.

• The New York Times covered the elections from nearly every angle — granular maps, candidates, issues, finances, advertising, polls — and in nearly every format: long-form video, interactive debate transcripts, timelines, panoramas, audio slide shows, mood trackers and more. Beyond politics, it’s difficult not to also mention “The Debt Trap;” everything related to the Olympics; the Guantánamo Detainees Docket; and, photographer Robbie Cooper’s “Immersion” hypnotizing video of young video-game players.

• The Globe and Mail produced a six-part series, “Talking to the Taliban,” a fascinating “unscientific survey” that paints a portrait of ordinary Taliban fighters in Afghanistan.

• The Las Vegas Sun’s “History of Las Vegas” project spanned the 100-plus years of stories, videos and even mob connections of that colorful city.

• St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s “Reporting for Duty” followed a group of recruits through nine weeks of basic training.

• The Roanoke Times covered a lot of emotional ground in a long-form video documentary covering a woman’s struggle with cancer, “Brooke Smith: Letting go, letting God.”

• ESPN’s “Ray of Hope” story on Jason Ray, a mascot at the University of North Carolina, whose unexpected death led to life-saving organ donations for several strangers.

• The Rocky Mountain News and MediaStorm partnered to create a comprehensive multimedia overview of the Democratic National Convention, “At last, at last, a dream fulfilled.” MediaStorm also partnered with Reuters to tackle “Bearing Witness,”an incredibly ambitious project chronicling five years of the Iraq war.

This list could go on forever — and it should. What great projects did we miss in this roundup? Post your suggestions in the comments below.

2008: The Year in News Design

• No. 7: The Obama effect – A big event moves papers

• No. 8: New skills emerge as newsrooms evolve

• No. 9: Untangling the migration to mobile

• No. 10: Is the best design really outside the U.S.?

No.7: The Obama effect – A big event moves papers. Yesterday we looked at how new skills are emerging as newsrooms evolve.

A victory – for print

It’s Christmas, so we thought it was appropriate to take a moment to cherish a big present the American press got this year: The election of Barack Obama. Forget politics, this was all about selling newspapers. Well, at least for a day.

That was the day after Obama was elected, Nov. 5 – a banner day for papers across the country as headlines declared the historic win for the nation’s first black president. Papers sold out fast as people realized that they wanted their piece of print to commemorate the moment. All that despite coverage far and wide online, on television and in magazines.

Waiting for the paper

Read all about it! People wait in line at the Chicago Tribune to buy the paper announcing that Barack Obama has been elected. (Photo from Chi-Cowboy’s Flickr stream)

Lines formed around the block at many newspapers. The boom time was on as papers cranked up the presses again to meet demand. One editor said he was happy that newspapers had now cornered the collectibles market. USA Today printed 500,000 extra copies, the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Sun-Times both printed another 250,000. Some people ordered papers by the truckload. It was a stunning moment to see the value print can still have.

The biggest winner? That appeared to be The Washington Post. The paper in Obama’s new hometown sold close to an extra million copies of its 26-page special edition. Now that’s a victory worth celebrating.

A gallery of the top papers

Gallery of the Top 50 U.S. newspapers’ front pages at NewsPageDesigner.com

2008: The Year in News Design

• No. 8: New skills emerge as newsrooms evolve

• No. 9: Untangling the migration to mobile

• No. 10: Is the best design really outside the U.S.?

If you’re not seeing how to move beyond print, you’re already behind

The days of living the rest of your journalistic career as a print page designer are nearing an end – and that’s a good thing.

As the revolution in media radically changes how people experience news and information, the way the people formerly known as the audience interact with, deconstruct, and contribute content takes on fascinatingly collaborative dimensions.

The smartest news organizations are seeing a new road ahead, both flying high and traveling low to the ground. That whole macro and micro thing. And, as a result, the people who work in these places are integrating old and new disciplines in engaging ways.

Design and presentation skill sets are undergoing radical change. The newsrooms of the future – er, the present – demand a parting with the past.

When Andrew DeVigal, the multimedia editor at The New York Times, spoke to a packed room at the Society’s annual workshop in Las Vegas this fall, he talked about how one of the world’s most-respected news organizations has made the leap. And DeVigal gave encouragement to every news org trying to break free of a print-first past.

Indeed, The Times has become a leader in telling stories across media, whether that’s developing new interactives that leverage the considerable Times reporting and data resources (like this one, Represent, from Andrei Scheinkman and Derek Willis that tracks elected officials) or the amazing photography and video from this year’s historic election season or letting developers themselves hack into that vast repository of information.

“If you want to see where the future is heading, study these intersections closely,” media consultant and Visual Editors CEO Robb Montgomery wrote after seeing the photograph that leads this post.

“Andrew’s graphic is telling on many levels. It is good at focusing on pro journos pushing content out there smartly but I can’t see any evidence of enabling what I call the “Social Narrative” (community news tips, comments, UGC, ratings, embedding, et all). The narrative elements that I strongly believe also must be integrated in any new thinking regarding integrating newsroom workflows.”

Putting journalism and technology together

The stuff at The New York Times is impressive, but that’s a place drawing on a host of skills and talents to make things. Some people scoff at the notion that anyone else can do what The Times does.

DeVigal showed the Vegas crowd the power of templates, though. That means the news organization is putting more technical capability in the hands of everyone to build a culture that can thrive on whatever platform is best to tell the story. It’s deploying a development team to help see the path ahead, sharing its insights with the industry.

Smaller news organizations and universities are doing the same thing.

At Spokesman.com, Ryan Pitts, assistant managing editor/digital, and the crew in Spokane have launched a Site Update blog, a commonplace tradition for testing in Silicon Valley that’s now starting to take hold with new organizations. The Spokane team encourages users to comment and request fixes to the new site, as well as suggest new content that will keep people coming back. Welcome to the two-way (or more) street.

There’s a brave new world of storytelling that includes programmers who understand journalism, as well as that idea of “social narrative” that Montgomery described.

Over at the Medill School of Journalism, where I work, my colleagues Rich Gordon and Jeremy Gilbert just finished teaching a class that resulted in exactly this kind of ambition. The class project, News Mixer, aimed to solve two challenging problems: Improving conversations around news, and building news engagement among young adults.

News Mixer was created by six Medill master’s students: Andrea Nitzke, Joshua Pollock, Stuart Tiffen, Kayla Webley and “programmer-journalists” Brian Boyer and Ryan Mark. Boyer and Mark, who had careers in computer programming before coming to Medill, enrolled at the school through a “programmer-journalist” scholarship program funded by the Knight News Challenge.

That melding of skills looks like the wave of the future. Deep audience understand coupled with new formats for presenting and interacting with information appear to be the natural next steps for news designers.

Ten basic new media skills that today’s journalist should know

Some journalists are just getting their feet wet online, as unbelievable as that may seem. Over at Silicon Valley Watcher, Tom Foremski suggested this year that you need basic skills like these:

• How to upload an image to a blog. (I know journalists that don’t know how.)
• How to add a link to text in an online story.
• How to take and edit a photo and resize it for a web page.
• How to embed the code for a video in a web page and resize it.
• How to find relevant links to a story and add them to it.
• How to take a digital video, edit it, and publish it in several formats.
• How to make online stories discoverable.
• How to read HTML and be able to fix common problems.
• How to read CSS and be able to make modifications in stylesheets.
• How to survive in an always-on work day, and produce two or three times as much content as before.

Between the obvious and the advanced

Mindy McAdams, who authors the influential blog Teaching Online Journalism, has a very helpful beginner’s guide to multimedia and a swell post on the basic kit you will want to get started as a multimedia reporter, just in case you need to start building those skills and you have no idea where to start.

There has to be more, right?

But, c’mon, there’s a lot more that a skilled online news designer or multimedia reporter needs to know. This all just seems like the basest of the base knowledge.

My former San Jose Mercury News colleague Chris O’Brien believes a mindset change has to happen before the print production cycle stops driving most newsroom decisions.

In a post at the Knight Digital Media Center, O’Brien asked these important questions: “Are the morning budget meetings and planning decisions still being driven by the need to create centerpieces and fill this section or that section? Are your critiques still driven by hanging the morning paper on the wall and discussing story placement? If these are the central conversations that are driving newsroom planning, then you’re not online first.”

So there’s a world of programs and programming that add to the online news design skill set, as well as the needed courage to leave behind the comfort and certainty of a print past. Designers better be ready because there are lots of people out there who are learning technical skills – and they are going to get those increasingly in-demand positions.

Nearly 30 years ago, when the Society was founded, newspaper designers were grappling with changes in technology that made possible things that seemed unimaginable to a previous generation. Seems like old times. Again.

2008: The Year in News Design

• No. 9: Untangling the migration to mobile

• No. 10: Is the best design really outside the U.S.?

Mobile technologies created huge ripples in 2008, both in and out of the news industry. Some milestones:

• The iPhone become the top-selling handset, with more than 13 million phones sold. Plus, Apple created a rapidly expanding and diverse marketplace for third-party applications.
• Google’s open-source mobile operating system, Android, made a big splash. Along with the iPhone, these devices completely redefined user’s expectations of smart phones — namely, migrating the richness of the Web into a handheld device.
• Twitter, the micro-blogging service, exploded in popularity with millions of users and, by some estimates, between 1-2 million tweets per day.
• The Kindle became a huge hit (even Oprah loves it) for reading long-form on the road, and keeping it fed with new books, newspapers, magazines and blog posts via an always-on and free wireless connection.

It was an epic year for handheld devices and the services that power them. And news organizations scrambled to respond.

Many of the most popular iPhone applications in the news category come from traditional organizations such as the AP, New York Times, USA Today, BBC, and CBS. Meanwhile, London’s Telegraph launched the first news app for Google’s Android platform. These applications allow for new modes of interaction. For example, users can contribute photos and reports from the field via the AP’s application or vote in polls that are broken down locally at USA Today.

Newsrooms also embraced the Twitter phenomenon. According to Erica Smith’s count, there are nearly 50,000 people following the updates from just the top-10 newspaper-affiliated Twitter accounts. She counted more than a thousand newspaper Twitter accounts in all last month, a number that’s sure to grow.

More importantly, these services facilitate communication in both directions. One study showed mobile-enabled systems helped information circulate more clearly than traditional channels during the shootings at Virginia Tech. James Buck, a UC Berkeley graduate journalism student, tweeted on his way to jail after being arrested by the Egyptian police for photographing protests in the country. Just last week, Mike Wilson posted Twitter updates moments after escaping a plane crash in Denver. During the attacks in Mumbai, Twitter became such a clearing house for information that Indian police asked users to stop posting for security reasons.

Challenges for news orgs

This abundance of information, and the tricky nature of attaching any type of authenticity or locality to it, becomes a major challenge for news organizations. Chrys Wu, who blogs at Ricochet, said that news organizations will need to balance their attention and vetting process with more speed than before. Some problems she sees:

• Deciding what is worth paying attention to (choosing which fire hoses you will drink from).
• How to monitor the incoming information.
• How to quickly and reliably distinguish what is “real” from what is not.
• How to best use the resources in-house (not just people, but the storehouses of information) to bring additional context to the incoming information.
• How to stay on top of the story and follow it all the way through.
• How to reach readers and earn their trust for news tips.
• And how to do it at a speed nearly as fast as the rest of the information being posted and traded by people who are where the news is happening.

William Couch, a designer at USA Today who helped launch the news organization’s iPhone application, believes that most news forays into mobile platforms thus far have been relatively underwhelming. “Most implementations I’ve seen have not leveraged the organization’s content in ways that are befitting of the medium.”

“There’s an interesting dichotomy growing in how people are consuming content,” he said. “The most obvious scenario is when you’ve got a few minutes free, whether you’re waiting in line, or — ahem — traffic, and want to get a few quick hits. The less obvious scenario that I see emerging and really growing as the mobile sphere matures is long-form content being consumed on mobile devices.”

He points to Instapaper (a Web service that allows users to store articles for reading later, in particular via an iPhone application that makes for more mobile-friendly reading) and the Kindle as examples to transport long-form content off the printed page. (Newspapers are faring relatively well in the Kindle marketplace).

Underlying this rapidly changing landscape are the hurdles facing designers: smaller screens, limited bandwidth, wildly varying capabilities between devices and entirely new user-interface paradigms — and all these variables are evolving at a whirlwind pace.

Where can designers turn for advice? Here are a few starting points:

• mocoNews.net is a good general resource for tracking new developments in the intersections of content creation and mobile devices.

• John Gruber distilled the ethos of iPhone user interface design to this guideline: “Figure out the absolute least you need to do to implement the idea, do just that, and then polish the hell out of the experience.”

• Bill Higgins talks about the “Uncanny Valley of user interface design,” suggesting developers design their applications specific to the characteristics of the platform on which they’re building.

• The 37signals team says “designing for the iPhone is like a hybrid of print and web design.” And there’s some great discussion in the comments.

• The Flickr team posted tons of technical details they encountered while building their highly scalable site.

• Wilson Miner discusses “relative readability” to highlight the importance of typographic scale.

And, obviously, we’ve barely scratched the surface. Sound off in the comments with your observations of mobile innovations this past year and resources for better utilizing these tools and services.

2008: The Year in News Design

• No. 10: Is the best design really outside the U.S.?

Each year we take the last few days of December to look back on the news design year that was. It’s been a crazy time for our craft and the industry, so take the trek with us over the next 10 days as we recount the biggest moments in a year filled with extraordinary change.

No. 10 - Is all the best design really outside the U.S.?

It has been nearly four years since there was a World’s Best-Designed Newspaper™ from the United States. In this decade, in fact, there have been only three U.S. recipients of the highest honor in newspaper design. Which begs the question: Is the best design happening outside America?

The newspapers that have been awarded in recent years are both a global who’s who of the design world and newcomers just bursting onto the scene. So much for thinking the fix is in.

To be fair, American papers do very well in the general competition, taking home a high percentage of awards for individual pieces of work. Yet that top award for the overall design of a publication appears curiously out of reach.

What has happened around the world that’s not happening in the U.S.?

Avid watchers of the global design scene point to an increasing experimentation with new formats as one reason for success. Many of the papers that have been honored are compacts, either tabloid or Berliner size, which offer unique design canvasses that break free of the mold in ways both beautiful and utilitarian.

The following video explains what the judges who chose 2007’s World’s Best™ were seeking when they awarded four papers with the coveted prize…

A look at the recent winners

The Guardian, London’s free-wheeling left voice, successfully made the break from broadsheet in 2005. It’s been honored twice as World’s Best since then. The paper’s use of color, strong sense of grid, and ability to surprise in risk-taking illustration and graphics has garnered The Guardian a new perch at the top of the newspaper design food chain.

The start-up Spanish financial daily, El Economista, also a small format paper, gorgeously used color and illustration to make its way onto the list. This year, Akzia in Russian and Expresso from Portugual were small-sized papers that won the big award.

That format change is something newspaper executives stateside have been unwilling to chance because of longtime ties to the broadsheet, especially for advertising. Ask many a top U.S. editor why she’s not yet taken her paper compact and the answer you will get is this: We just can’t risk the revenue.

Broadsheet can’t be the only thing holding back U.S. papers from taking the top award, can it? After all, there are several scrappy tabloids in the U.S. doing some very interesting design.

And if you look to larger format newspapers like Die Zeit and Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, which have been awarded World’s Best multiple times in recent years, the answer points to something more systemic.

What does it take?

Jurors through the years have talked about an overall consistency and an adherence to design principles throughout each winning newspaper, an awareness of voice and tone that helps to permeate a publication and leave a lasting mark of identity. The attention to interior pages has often been cited as something noticeably absent from American papers, as well.

And, time and again, the World’s Best™ judging panel, which changes from year to year, has asked that U.S. newspapers be more bold in presentation, more daring in the chances they will take, and more sophisticated in their choices.

As the judges who chose the 29th Edition’s best said: “If print is dead, it’s a pretty live corpse.” Well, at least around the world.

What will happen for the 30th Edition of The Best of Newspaper Design™ when a new set of judges looks back on 2008? It’s anyone’s guess, especially with so many U.S. newspapers overhauling their designs in the last year. Stay tuned when the judging panel convenes in February at Syracuse University.

• Coming next > No. 9: Untangling the migration to mobile

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Resources

The Best of Newspaper Design™ site on snd.org

The 2008 Call for Entries

Coverage of the 29th Edition of The Best of Newspaper Design™

Coverage of the 28th Edition of The Best of Newspaper Design™

UPDATED: More questions answered in the third section.

It’s official: The Detroit Free Press and The Detroit News, will become the first major U.S. newspapers to curtail seven-day home delivery. The news was announced by the Detroit Media Partnership, the agency controlling the interests of both the Gannett and Media News papers, at a press conference this morning in the Motor City.

The confirmation comes after several days of speculation, first reported by The Wall Street Journal, about a fundamental change in the business model for the struggling Free Press and News. The papers work together in all matters other than editorial under a Joint Operating Agreement. The change is expected to happen in the first quarter of 2009.

The highlights of the plan:

• Goodbye to every day delivery: Both papers will cease seven-day home delivery to all subscribers as they begin transitioning to more online delivery of news.

• Hello to three-day delivery: The JOA will instead focus on Thursday and Friday delivery of both papers and Sunday delivery of the Free Press only. Those days are the most lucrative for advertising and have often been considered in the newspaper world as the “money” days for both sales and circulation.

• Get it on the newsstand: The papers will offer single copy editions six days of the week; only the Free Press will publish a Sunday single copy edition.

• A new pricing model for subscriptions and a push to online: Sevens days of access to an e-edition would also include the three days of home delivery.

The design and implentation

We talked to Steve Dorsey, the deputy managing editor for presentation and innovation at the Free Press, about the changes. Dorsey, the Society’s incoming Secretary-Treasurer, has been involved with the plan and aspects of its implementation for months.

Dorsey has been working closely with IDEO, the Silicon Valley design firm, on transforming the way the newspaper approaches serving its audience. IDEO has worked with companies around the world and has been profiled widely in the business press, ranking as No. 5 on Fast Company’s list of the World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies.

It’s not Dorsey’s first experience with the company. The Free Press worked with IDEO during the end of the paper’s Knight Ridder ownership.

In a bold plan, Carole Leigh Hutton, then publisher and editor of the Free Press, asked her newsroom to help solve the challenges facing Detroit.

A small team began working on audience observation and rapid prototyping of a new newspaper in 2005. Hutton and her team presented a radical reinvention of the Free Press to Knight Ridder that involved fewer sections and a wildly innovative new design. Plans were shelved before implementation, though, because Knight Ridder sold the Free Press to Gannett.

The new ideas in Detroit unveiled today begin to take that earlier work to a new level.

“We knew how they (IDEO) would bring design thinking into the prototyping process,” Dorsey said in an email interview this morning. “This time, there was a longer investment and a deeper cross-divisional involvement that led to a greater commitment to IDEO’s process and philosophy of human centered design. Ultimately, this is transforming the overall way we’re approaching change at all levels of the Free Press and in the Partnership. This will extend far beyond today’s news.”

Some critics have panned the process with IDEO, worrying that the design firm does not completely understand how to work with the news media.

The influential designer Juan Antonio Giner of Innovation called it “the way to death” in a posting last week, and the Gannett Blog has been buzzing with rumors about IDEO’s role.

But the leaders of the transformation defend the IDEO process.

“IDEO challenged some of the assumpti