Design

I’ve been thinking more about the Tribune Co.’s “radical” print newspaper redesigns, which started with its Orlando Sentinel last Sunday. I’ve checked out the print edition each day this week.

Overall, my impressions are big-time negative — not so much from a how-it-looks perspective (the design is nice enough), but rather from a corporate strategy perspective.

1. It’s not that radical of a redesign. I wrote last week after viewing the online preview of the print redesign that it didn’t seem that much different from a USA Today-like revamping. After looking over its pages this week, I just can’t see that this is something that is going to “save” printed newspapers. It’s hardly a “reinvention” of the print medium.
2. It’s not going to win over younger people. To the Internet-savvy young person for whom newspapers are another generation’s relic media, this revamping of the printed newspaper won’t even register. Instead, the abrupt change in how the paper looks will annoy established readers who still value the print edition. My prediction: 6 months from now the Sentinel will have fewer print subscribers.
3. The redesign is flash disguising editorial cutbacks. I get a strong sense from this redesign that it is an attempt to win over people with short, Internet-fueled attention spans by using flash and splash to cover up the fact that there’s less to the paper. It feels like a TV or radio mentality applied to newspapers, and it won’t work, IMHO. Look at the negative reactions in Hartford, Connecticut from readers who are hearing about Tribune owner Sam Zell’s instructions to the Courant’s publisher to reduce editorial content to a 50/50 editorial/ad split. The redesign in Orlando is meant to cover that up (Zell’s edict applies in Orlando, too), but I’m confident that Orlandoans will see this as a ploy and reject it.
4. The redesign goes in the wrong direction. I think Zell is misguided to think that putting a corporate team of TV and radio people in charge of reinventing the company’s printed newspapers is the way to go. They seem to be steering it to in-your-face visuals and make-it-shorter articles. But people still willing to read printed papers tend to be older and more thoughtful, so that’s the wrong direction. Orlando’s paper would do better to aim for New York Times instead of New York Post.
5. Redesigning print won’t save the company. This is the key point. A good, smart print redesign could go far in retaining existing readers who like reading on paper; it will hold on to them a bit longer. (A badly conceived one, as I view Orlando’s, will result in readers fleeing.) But a redesign is not going to bring new readers to print. The Tribune Co. needs to put all its creativity and crazy ideas into Internet strategy, which is what is going to save the company.

One reason for my sense of Tribune Co. doom is employee morale, which must be pretty low right now. An indicator of that is this video of a speech by Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez, who insults his Tribune Co. bosses at a Los Angeles Press Club awards event (to hearty laughter from the crowd). I don’t know how an effective turnaround is going to happen in an atmosphere of employee disdain and disrespect for company leaders. (If I’m wrong on this, perhaps some folks inside Tribune newspapers will set me straight.)

My prediction: Zell, famous for his expletives, will be doing a lot more cursing before Tribune starts to go down in flames after not making its debt payments within the next year or two.

This Sunday, the Orlando Sentinel will debut a significant redesign of the print edition (prompted, of course, by Tribune Co. owner Sam Zell’s company-wide call to go crazy and reinvent newspapers). While I’m writing this in advance of seeing the actual paper, there is a nice multimedia presentation that shows what’s coming. So I’m commenting on what’s being shown there.

The Orlando Sentinel’s new design debuts on Sunday.

This feels very much like the introduction of USA Today so many years ago. Lots of the innovations feel the same: Let’s assume that readers don’t have much of an attention span and that we have to hit them over the head with a 2×4. Shorter. Punchier. Flashier. Perkier writing. Big photos and art. Bigger and better digests showing what’s inside.

What’s new here that USA Today didn’t do years ago? Bringing in more outside voices — reader comments, bloggers — is the main difference I spotted. Am I missing anything?

Personally, I think I’d prefer this newly designed paper over an older and more traditionally designed one. I’m not one who gets freaked out by drastic overnight changes in my media. But I wonder if older readers who still cling to reading print editions will freak out, and feel like the new paper is dumbed down (despite the editor’s assurance that it’s not).

It feels like the redesign is aimed at getting more younger readers. OK, that’s a rational goal. But I don’t think that’s achievable, because printed newspapers are simply not the medium of choice for today’s younger generation.

What I fear may happen is that this radical redesign will not attract significant numbers of new young readers. Rather, it will turn off the loyalists who still buy the print edition.

OK, that was rather negative. How about a more positive comment?

First off, I’ve been immersed in online for a long time; I left my last print newspaper job in late 1993. I’m not a big believer anymore in print newspapers, and I think they’ll continue to slowly wind down as the masses switch to digital and mobile means of consuming news. So from my (admittedly not mainstream) view, trying to improve the printed newspaper is a bit of a “putting lipstick on a pig” exercise. (Hmm… I’m still being pretty negative. )

If Zell wants his newspapers to truly innovate, perhaps he should get his people to do something truly innovative. (Flashy print redesigns don’t strike me as the best use of innovators’ brain cells. That’s not to say that they’re without merit; on the contrary, I think they are of value. I did spend several years working in a newspaper art department, and have affection for and appreciation of the value of newspaper design. No, I just think there are bigger fish to fry, and most of it involves figuring out a new business model for online and mobile, not trying to gussy up the print edition.)

I see a couple key issues that newspaper companies need to address: 1. news-on-demand, and 2. personalization. Print editions are anything but news-on-demand, so we can strike that; you can’t pick up a newspaper and go read or view something that’s not already on the printed page.

Personalization of the print edition, on the other hand, may be a good area to innovate. Next Thursday and Friday I’m attending the Conference on the Individuated Newspaper, which is being hosted by the folks at Denver-based MediaNews Group. The event’s focus is not just online but also on individualizing print editions, in recognition of printing technology advances that make it feasible. Perhaps some interesting ideas will come out of that, and I’ll share them.

I’m sure I’ll write in more depth after the conference, but just to give you an idea of what’s coming, think about a newspaper with a personalized section (or wrapper) that contains news happening in your neighborhood — which could be from sources beyond just the newspaper staff (local bloggers, school websites, etc.) — and that matches your recorded preferences (sports teams you like, specific industry news, etc.). That’s all stuff that you can do “fairly easily” online. True innovation offline would be adding some of this to the print edition.

I’m less of a print fan than many in the newspaper industry, but if I were to steer some of my thinking to print again, I wouldn’t expect even an excellent redesign to do much more than pretty up that pig.

On this blog (and many others), if you post a comment your personal avatar will automatically accompany your comment — assuming that you have an avatar assigned to your e-mail address using either Gravatar or MyBlogLog (both free services).

Many of you have yet to assign yourselves avatars. These can be comic characters (as I use) or graphic illustrations, or photos (of yourself or some object). So how about it? I’d love to see more photos and illustrations accompanying your comments!

(And I have some personal interest in this, since one of the projects I’m working on will let people create personal avatars. That’s not ready yet, but there are plenty of other options for creating avatars of yourself; or just use a photo.)

This is a great quote, by Dan Gillmor (via a Twitter post by Dan Pacheco):

OK, perhaps the second sentence is paraphrased, but I really like it. “‘Dog bites man’ is newsworthy if you know the man, or dog,” so nicely sums up what I’ve been thinking for some time about what many have termed “hyper-local” journalism.

Yes, dog bites man, or 5th-grader hits winning home run, or woman wins teacher of the year award at Smith Elementary are boring items to nearly everyone — but not to the people involved and the people who know them. For the latter group, it’s important stuff.

We now have the technology available online (and for mobile devices) to deliver that boring-to-everyone-but-me stuff to the right people. We don’t need to produce a weekly give-away print product filled with boring dog-bites-man stuff, because we can deliver it to the people for whom it’s important, interesting, and vital — and not bore everyone else.

To critics of hyper-local news or “citizen journalism,” I will argue that it can be powerful stuff when and only when it’s targeted well. I can envision a future — and I look forward to it — when services are available to send me news on my smartphone letting me know that the guy down the street got bit by a dog.

I’m doing a little market research for a project and would greatly appreciate your advice. My question: What would you do with a personal avatar that looked like a comic-strip version of you? How would you use it? What uses could you foresee for a comic avatar of your face and body, or just your face (digital or physical-world)?

Here are a couple examples of comic avatars. Also see the comic avatar of me at the top of this page.

Leave a comment here or send me a private message. Thanks for your help!

A common criticism of news websites — especially ones run by small and medium sized newspaper companies and TV news outlets — is that they don’t invest enough in programming or web development talent. Perhaps their sites don’t look as professional, or are not as full featured as they could be because not enough resources are devoted to online operations. They’ve not adapted adequately to the new media environment where having enough geeks around is a requirement for long-term survival.

This won’t be for everyone, but there are several related web services that can get some of your development and design tasks done for reasonable, often very low rates. Using them is a way to extend the web development and design staff you have by off-loading some of their work. Continued

This item is about saving money, not making it. … Look at the top of this page. See the graphic site logo or masthead with the flames? That cost $1.30 to produce. OK, maybe you get what you pay for, you’re thinking … but I kinda like it.

So the story is that I found the graphic with the flames on iStockPhoto.com, a wonderful and inexpensive web stock imagery resource. The site has a huge database of images — photos, illustrations, Flash graphics, video — with new imagery coming in every day. Prices for licensing are dirt cheap compared to traditional stock agencies. That’s because the work doesn’t come from high-priced pro photographers and artists, but rather any photographers or artists who want to add their work and make a few bucks. Continued

The folks in the online department at the Poynter Institute are working on a major redesign for Poynter.org (aka, Poynter Online). It’ll be the first significant overhaul of the website, a resource and training tool for journalists, in 5 or 6 years. In fact, the last big redesign pre-dated the last two eyetracking studies conducted by Poynter, so this one should incorporate some of the knowledge gleaned from that research. (Disclaimer: I was the project manager on one of those studies about 3 years ago.) Continued

My former colleagues at the Poynter Institute have produced a nice video about the upcoming (significant) redesign of Poynter.org (aka, Poynter Online). I worked with Poynter for about four years (I’ve now been away a couple years), and first arrived just as the team was putting finishing touches on the previous redesign, as I recall.

I’m looking foward to seeing what the smart folks at Poynter do with this one. The current design doesn’t take into account the results of the last two eyetracking studies by Poynter; this new one will. Should be interesting to see what they come up with.

What’s one of the biggest flaws that eyetrack research reveals about the current design? On the homepage in the right column is a list of the site’s columnists. Placement on the page is almost guaranteed to not be seen by many page visitors. Moving that to the left would give columnists better visibility and probably more clickthroughs by users. The navigation links in the left column take up valuable homepage real estate. Moving them to a horizontal nav across the top would work as well or better. It appears from this video that fixing those problems will be part of the redesign.

The guys over at Evomo must be ecstatic about this. They make stylish mountain biking apparel (including some branded t-shirts commissioned by my former company, the Enthusiast Group), and one of their fans asked if he could get a tattoo using Evomo’s “Braincase” design. The answer from Evomo head honcho Bryan Thombs: “Hell-yeeeaaaah!”

So here’s the pic. The crazy mountain biker didn’t go so far as to brand Evomo’s name on his skin, but that’s still a pretty nice bit of free customer marketing for the company. He’s a walking billboard for Evomo, since everyone’s going to ask him about it.

That is a pretty cool design. If I were younger, I might wear that t-shirt; it doesn’t really fit my 51-year-old sensibilities. Tattoo? Probably not.