One of the brightest essays I've read recently on the state of the newspaper industry can be found here:
BrassTacksDesign.Com
Alan Jacobson at BrassTacks Design has graciously allowed me to link to "If newspaper markets are so different, who do newspapers look so much alike?" I thank him not only for the link but for ingeniously demonstrating one of my pet peeves: Editors who slavishly follow so-called "industry trends" instead of seeking truly innovative, market-derived solutions to serve their specific audiences.
As shocking as it might seem to outsiders, far too many newspapers, even in the 21st Century, are designed without the input of focus groups and advisory boards and market studies and reader feedback. Oh, feedback eventually comes to play, but only after the "redesign" has been trudged out and angry customers complain that a certain feature/font/point size/ has been eliminated/changed/diminished. Then the newspaper might respond to feedback. Maybe.
How, you might be asking yourself, can this possibly occur? Good question.
The long answer will be in my book. But if I were going to thumbnail the process, it looks like this: Editor A is "bored" with his newspaper's look. Or he falls under the Readership Institute spell and and adopts the mantra that all (generic) readers prefer a (generic) "active" look; that readers won't read something if it isn't "attractive." So, Editor A or his/her appointed in-house design expert will spend a week at a newspaper design camp. He or she will return convinced that after looking at what everyone else is doing, the newspaper can adopt changes that readers will love, even though those readers didn't even know they wanted them.
Even I have been guilty of this phenomenon. But it was a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away... I listened to people smarter than me and eventually became enlightened. Today I stand with other long-time media professionals steadfastly convinced "Content is king." That many so like-minded individuals currently seek work is merely a coincidence. Or so I am told.
Anyway, allow me to prove my point: Yesterday was the day after an election in Illinois. I don't care how ugly your front page was, it sold more papers than Tuesday's edition - despite the low voter turnout. Nearly every newspaper in the U.S. sells more newspapers the day after an election than nearly every other day of the year. Large. Small. Prettied up. Ghastly ugly.
This leads to my my long-held belief that the editor who discovers how to make each edition as sought after as the day after an election will have truly cracked the DNA code of his/her audience. Sadly, many prefer to wait for something like Readership.org to do that for them.
Because of the 1982 debut of USA Today and the advent of such groups as the renamed Society of News (sans "paper") Design, editors have done much to change the look of newspapers in the past quarter century. Design has improved - no question - and readability has been improved. Regardless, the period of 1982-present has been horrific for the newspaper industry in terms of circulation and readership. So, methinks, editors may have been too-focused on the comfortable realm of design instead of the hard work of talking with our audience about improving content. In fact, one could make the argument that since there are fewer newspaper reporters now than in 1982, that the industry was completely focused on the wrong readership solutions.
For the book... Save something for the book... Yes, I am stilling writing that book...
As Alan has demonstrated on his site, even when newspaper editors have tackled design, many have gone about it in an awkward fashion. Those designs were likely the results of editors aping editors NOT editors working closely to glean the specific needs of their individual audiences to create an intuitive experience.
In fact, there is a dirty little lie in the newspaper industry shared among many editors. They believe they can design a page that is so good it can trick readers into reading it - even if said reader is not interested in the content! A graphic here. Some white space there. A stylish font here. An entry point there. Voila! No one will even notice we laid off more reporters today!
I tried to make the following point to an editor recently: You do not have enough design talent and your company does not supply you with enough technology to trick me into reading something that is not of interest to me. Better you should err in spending your time on local content than on an elaborate design of some wire "package."
I am not advocating that newspapers look ugly. Clean, simple design concepts were made available to all many years ago by Tim Harrower in the classic "The Newspaper Designer's Handbook." Folks like Alan at BrassTacks have loads of good ideas (read the sidebar article on the Bakersfield project!).
However, market-specific design and content augmentations can only be achieved via sweat equity and the tough work of cracking your market's specific DNA.
All the answers to your newspaper's success are in your market. Involve the audience. Worship your readers. Innovation will follow.
More later,
Mark
2 comments:
The thing is you can gussy a paper up, make it visual eye-candy, and actually gain readers for a short period of time. But in the end, readers are too smart and eventually see through the pleasantries. If you can't put substance, that is important to the reader, forget about it. Copley would be a prime example of that. It seems now days newspapers are so busy trying to get new readers or keep the readers they have, that they actually lose sight of what is truly important....the readers. Unfortunately that's going to mean the death of a lot of mid-size newspapers in the long run. I think you can make a paper that is relevant and pretty at the same time. But without content a newspaper is nothing but recycle material.
BINGO!! Absolutely right on the money as usual. I can tell you what I hear constantly is that readers are tired of McPaper....an unacceptable arrangement of AP stories. Honestly Mark, you are light years ahead of those running the game.
The word visionary comes to mind. And you know what? That's sad in a way because the way you view the problems facing the newspaper industry are so common sense and basic that everyone should get it. Are they stuck in some alternate universe where basics don't count? Are they so close to the problem they can't see solutions? Are the solutions acutally so simple that they can't possibly believe they'd work?
Here's a simple little example. I love cruising interesting blogs, but sometimes it's time consuming to navigate and find new and interesting sites. I would love it if the newspaper had a blogroll. Every week or every day a list of interesting blogs to check out. Science blogs...poetry blogs...food blogs, categorized or random. I mentioned this to an editor, and the idea might as well have fallen into a black hole.
Keep on pushing Mark. Lots of people believe in you. The only problem is, we don't own a newspaper, we only read them. Yeah, you're point exactly!
Post a Comment