News Design School

How many people would pay for Twitter?

Bob — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 20:38:07 +0000

How much would Americans pay for Twitter?

Zero. Zip. Nada.

At least that is one of the findings in the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism’s (USC) annual report on our Digital Future.

Just under half of Americans report that they have used Twitter, but not one of the people surveyed said they would be willing to pay. As hated as online advertising is, people said they would rather put up with ads than have to pay out of pocket.

I have long suspected that much of the appeal of Twitter, and other similar programs, comes from being free. That explains the inanity of many tweets: you get what you pay for. With a free program, people almost feel compelled to use it, usually badly.

Frankly, I think there is a wearing off of the thrill as the average person finds out that he or she has to keep on tweeting if one is going to be a true tweeter. I have noted on my Twitter feeds that fewer and fewer tweets are coming from individuals; most come from organizations or from independent consultants trying to get work.

Now it could be that it is just the summer doldrums and that the numbers will pick up again in September.
But I wonder if some people are tiring of the pressure to tweet. Time will tell.

Online advertising looking good for newspapers

Bob — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 13:01:43 +0000

Online advertising is starting to help beleaguered newspapers a bit — surely good news for the troubled industry.

According to a story in the Wall Street Journal, newspapers’ online revenue in 2009 hit $2.7 billion. This while newspapers’ print revenue continued to fall to about $24 billion, about half what it was in 2000. So the good news is that newspapers aren’t bleeding as much.

It may not be a financial savior, but I hope it’s enough to keep newspapers alive for awhile, if only online. I still say they are our best hope for the future because their newsgathering staff, as cut back as it is, is still superior to that of broadcast stations. Let’s face it, if you want local news, you are going to get it from a newspaper web site, not a television station.

Working on new News Design School

Bob — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 13:23:21 +0000

I would like to apologize for being fairly inactive as a blog writer and to the site as a whole. I have been struggling with a new direction for NDS, and I couldn’t decide what to do. So I allowed myself to become frozen with indecision.

But I have made up my mind on what I want to do next. It is going to take a while, however, and I don’t want to shut down the site while I re-tool. So please be patient and soon the site will be improved.

As a gift for your patience, I am now giving away my e-book on Writing Effective Ad Copy. Visit the E-books page to get yours. Just shoot me an e-mail and I’ll send you the e-book.

Thanks for understanding.

Gannett and newspaper design

Bob — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 14:11:34 +0000

Gannett started the conversation when it announced that it was going to centralize the design function of many of its papers at five regional hubs.

As might be expected, newspaper designers, led by the Society for News Design, complained in a loud voice.

SND complained that designers are critical to the success of newspapers and then tried to give reasons why design is important.

Design IS important, but designers are not. A lot of designers, and SND itself, created this problem years ago when designers began acting like art directors for magazines. Many newspapers, especially the large ones, hired design staff. Then they began justifying their own existence.

Newspapers don’t need art direction. They don’t need pages that look like magazines.

What I think is important here is the distinction between being a designer and being a visual journalist. Being a good visual journalist, helping to tell the story is what is important. This can be done from a central desk. It’s not optimum, but it is do-able.

I think newspaper design is a crucial part of being a good newspaper. I just don’t think you need “designers.” It may be a matter of semantics, but it is an important distinction.

Color in newspapers

Bob — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 13:58:19 +0000

I understand that the current trend in color in newspapers is away from the pastels, but I feel that the use of intense primary colors is jarring.

In my mind, this is especially true of the Wall Street Journal, which is largely a black-and-white newspaper. The bold colors create too much of a contrast for me, especially when used on an info graphic on an otherwise gray page (example).

I don’t have the colors scanned exactly right, but you get the idea. Does anyone else feel this way? Is newspaper design becoming like fashion runways in Paris, where designers compete with radical designs just to get attention? What do you think?

Links to related stories as subheds

Bob — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 14:08:52 +0000

I have been doing quite a lot of thinking lately (which is good — I sure haven’t been posting) and reading about good newspaper design on the web.

I am convinced that newspaper home pages are much too busy. Trying to do much too much and be everything for everybody. So what you end up with is a mishmash of links, content and ads. The worst ads are those that expand into the viewable area, either hiding content or pushing it away, creating the links-as-moving-targets moment. But that’s for another post.

One way I have come to like is the use of links to related stories as subheads, as in this story from CNN. The links are camouflaged as subheds, providing the benefit of breaking up the text while also providing doorways to other stories. The deeper you go in the story, the deeper into background you should go because the people who read an entire story are certainly more interested in the subject matter than those who quit after a couple of grafs.

I like the idea. Now back to the thinking board…

Design IS user experience

Bob — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 17:35:08 +0000

I am always surprised to find that much of the online community so narrowly defines design that a number of other terms have been coined to cover what’s purportedly lost: user experience being the worst. The field also includes such terms as interaction design, user-centered design (hey, if it ain’t, it ain’t design), user experience design, and usability.

Design is all about usability: it’s not art. This is true whether it’s online or in old-fashioned print. “User experience,” my personal favorite, even has its own magazine, UX. Gads!

Not to be splitting hairs here, but the design of something includes how someone uses it, how someone feels about it. It involves how someone will use that which is designed.

I think we just confuse the issue and dilute the importance of design as a field when we use these other high-falutin’ terms. If something is designed well, the “user” will have a good “experience” when using it, when interacting with it.

That’s good design. Period.

How to educate journalists, part 2

Bob — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 13:12:51 +0000

Since we are talking about education, I have to comment on the recent news that Walmart employees can now get college credit for such activities as ringing up purchases, checking inventory and unloading trucks.

Sure they say it’s for such work-related issues as business ethics and “retail inventory management,” but since when did retail work at any store, much less Walmart, equal undergraduate OR even graduate school credit?

Walmart is providing a 15% discount on tuition at American Public University, an online-only school based in Charles Town, West Virginia. You can also play the ponies and slots there. They charge $750 for a three-credit course undergraduate course, more for a graduate course. Offered only online. Heck, even if you paid all the activity and lab fees, one would pay only $435 at the University of Florida this summer.

What could cost APU so much to run an online course? How can you justify allowing worker bees up to 45% of a college education by working at Walmart?

What’s wrong with our current idea of “higher education,” one that opens it doors to anyone with a high school diploma (and we all know that some graduates read at the middle school level or worse) and then offers hundreds of hours of basically free classes and tutoring to get them up to speed? What is it “higher” than?

Truth is higher education has been slipping into mediocrity for years. This is yet another example.

How to educate new journalists

Bob — Thu, 27 May 2010 15:19:34 +0000

The education of journalists is going through the same upheavals that journalism itself is going through.

Should j-programs go with a convergence model, which gives students experience with multimedia tools, or should they create subject-matter experts, allowing them to gather the necessary technical experience on the job?

I think many schools are going with the former, bringing together their print and radio/TV folks under one roof. The University of Missouri is going with the latter, probably with an eye to blogging for cash, should traditional newspaper or newspaper web site jobs not be available.

The main point here is that most j-schools are flying blind. They don’t truly know what journalists will need in five years, aside from the usual critical thinking skills and the ability to put words together in a meaningful way.

What do you think?

Newspaper designers are dorks

Bob — Fri, 21 May 2010 17:14:05 +0000

All right, let’s be honest. We’re among friends.

Newspaper designers are dorks. Undateable. Uninteresting. Consumed with minutiae. Care about things no one else does, sort of like Trekkies. I am convinced that you could change the premise of the TV show The Big Bang Theory so that the protagonists were newspaper designers instead of physics mavens and the show could remain pretty much the same.

You ask a newspaper designer how s/he liked a story and you get a treatise on typefaces, linespacing, column widths, color theory, blah blah blah — everything but whether they liked the story or not. God help you if you ask them about an information graphic. I love newspaper designers.

Just for fun, I would like some help in compiling a list titled: “You know you are a newspaper designer if you….”

I think it’s perfect for a Friday in May. Whatcha got for me?