October, 2006

Take a look at the circulation results for the top 25 U.S. newspapers.

Yeowtch!

As I read through the whistle-stops in yet another depressing conversation about newspapers cutting back, I'm reminded of where I like to go to see some of the most creative work coming out of all those "dinosaur" newsrooms.

NewsDesigner.com consistently gets the scoop -- from preview prototypes to post-launch reactions -- when well-known newspapers roll out new designs. That makes the blog must reading for me, since I spent the first 10 years of my professional career as a designer and art director, and several years prior at the little paper my family ran learning about typesetting and print production.

So I like to peek in on the projects to see how trends in typography, sectioning, use of color and overall information packaging change. Unfortunately, having checked out several recent projects, I'm coming to a belief that gives the old art director in me the creeps.

Design friends, I feel guilty for this, but here it is: American newspapers invest too many of their shrinking resources on design.

Why would I say that?

First, an inside-pool example: Too many newspapers still pay full-time employees to create from-scratch illustrations for feature stories, in particular. Forget about Society for News Design awards. You cannot demonstrate a return on investment in staff time for commercial illustrations, and with rare exception, you can't tell me they're journalism.

More economically efficient art directors hire free-lance artists for illustrations, but I've been there, kids: Too often, the free-lance budget gets cut and staffers wind up taking on illustration duties because assigning editors want to make a story into a centerpiece, can't think of alternatives and are running out of time.

Readers, frankly, couldn't give a rat's rump about that planning problem. And news executives who cut free-lance illustration budgets are blind to the inefficiency of their decisions.

But that's not the most profound example of excess design investment. Too often, I believe, newspapers embark on major redesigns even when they don't meet one of my Three Strategic Criteria for Redesigning a Newspaper:

1. The newspaper's presentation is so badly broken that a redesign will make it measurably easier to read and/or comprehend each day's contents.
2. News organizational workflow is so badly broken that a redesign, and associated process improvements, can actually save measurable resources for other things -- or save cash if you just don't have anything else to spend it on (pshyeah, right!).
3. The newspaper's content itself is so badly broken that it needs to be completely overhauled, and a redesign in that context brings measurable economies of scale to that overhaul.

The first two criteria only very rarely fit -- most newspapers long ago achieved affluence of competency in design. The third probably fits too often but is least likely to be a driver for redesign. Nowadays I see too many major redesigns happening for less profound reasons:

People who don't like to drill into design details, feel free to bypass this post.
The rest of you might remember I wrote in July about the differences between the orange RSS "ripple" icon originally put forth in Mozilla products such as Firefox, and the variant that started showing up about the time Microsoft said it would use the icon in Internet Explorer 7. (That post included examples of both versions.)

Links in search of irrational exuberance: