Whenever I visit my wife in Northern Virginia and I read her copy of the Washington Post, I find myself reading stories I know I would have passed over in my local paper, The Florida Times-Union. Why is that? The question has been bugging me since Christmas.

I think what is happening is that the Post has such an aura (of…what?) around it that it just automatically makes everything seem interesting. Although, I think it is not so much that I think what is in the Post is more interesting, but that I make the opposite assumption about the T-U.

The T-U does not have the same staff as the Post, my thinking goes, so the coverage and the story are not going to be as good. Or maybe it’s the headlines. I am going to really watch myself read this week to try to see if I can understand what’s going on.

I do think that, based on my initial observations, cutting staff and thereby cutting the quality of the product, is not the way to go. You can only cut so much before you not only make decision not to read, you make the decision not to buy.

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I use this little tale to get my students talking about critical thinking, scientific research, evidence and writing. But it has value beyond the classroom.

One simple parsing of the third umpire’s statement is that naming something helps create the  “isness” of that something. Calling a dandelion a flower is different from calling it a weed,  in terms of our emotional reaction toward it.

Calling the act of charging for the processing of information and data into news a “paywall”
is part of the problem. A wall naturally separates two things. Calling it a wall gives it a  negative spin. Why not call it a portal?

People used AOL for many years as a paid “portal” to both its own content and eventually to
the Internet. That ended after a while not because people refused to pay at all, but because AOL no longer offered content that could not be gotten elsewhere for free.

Despite the many people who say that the toothpaste is out of the tube, that newspapers can’t  go back to a paid web model, I think they can. Maybe. If it is done right and by a lot of papers at the same time.

They may not have a choice.

Sure, they will lose some subscribers, probably a lot of subscribers initially, but if they offer value, people will pay to get it.

People pay today for access for all sorts of cable channels they can’t get for free elsewhere. They pay for cell phones, text messaging, Netflix, and they pay for high speed Internet access, although you can get dial-up for free or virtually so. I bet most people would be willing to pay a few cents per tweet.

The issue is not so much that people WON’T pay, it’s that you have to give them something they want. Then they’ll pay.

I think that’s going to have to be the model moving forward. Give people something they want and ask them to support it by paying. Relying on CPM advertising is no longer a workable model. Corporate sponsorship along the lines of public radio and television stations might help as well.

This is going to be a painful time for newspapers, and the new version won’t look much like the old, but the creative and bold will survive if they can metamorphize from their caterpillar past into their butterfly future.

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If you need help with your newspaper design, e-mail me.

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1. Good design is important, but content is king. I think most people – except maybe for out-of-work designers – would agree. I do believe the point bears repeating, however. It should become a mantra, chanted throughout the newsroom. Readers don’t care whether you use Arial or Franklin Gothic for your cutlines. They do care about getting good content and design that doesn’t get in the way.

2. Designers are important for setting up the format and overall layout and spacing guidelines, but are less important than reporters and editors to the day-to-day overall product. It almost pains me to write those words, but I think it is true. Push comes to shove, I would rather have writers and editors than designers.

3. Design cannot be treated as a cosmetic add-on after all the content has been gathered. Design concepts must be integrated into the newsgathering process from the very beginning. The best time to think about design is when the assignments are being made. Bring the visual people into the planning meetings. Don’t simply  hit them up on deadline for some clip art to “dress up” your story.

4. I don’t think people who lay out ad-free pages should worry about making each issue a unique set of pages. Readers don’t care, and the reality is only a handful of placements on pages work well any way. It would speed up the process to have a designer create a series of 5-6 templates and then get out of the way.

The copy desk folks could then call up the template that fit the best and make the few, small changes the content requires. No need to re-invent the wheel each issue and no need to pay designers to do layouts. That’s like paying police officers to be school crossing guards.

Pages with ads on them need designers even less. The ads pretty much limit what can be done beyond slotting in stories and packages in the space available. Again, get a designer to set up some standards and train the desk folks in the basics and be done with it.

5. I think newspaper designers worry too much about typeface, color and related issues that readers simply don’t care about. Although I think branding and user experience can be helpful in market differentiation, most newspapers have a monopoly. The web, magazines and television are competitors only if you stretch the term a bit.

There’s an understated beauty in black-and-white, and I think an all B&W newspaper could be successful. It would be an easier and slightly cheaper paper to produce. Every buck you could save would help.

I’d spend money on solving circulation problems and getting ink that doesn’t come off on your hands, clothes and tablecloths.

6. I think the Society for News Design has created this monster by (a) handing out thousands of awards each year, and (b) rewarding “pretty” when it should have been rewarding “successful.”

All those awards are ridiculous, and SND still pretty much ignores the vast majority of newspapers in the country, the small-circulation dailies and weeklies. It would be like handing out 15 Best Picture statues at the Oscars. Those awards remind me of the many self-congratulating awards that advertising folks hand out to one another in a number of competitions. The creative ads win, sure, but I want to know whether they succeeded in moving product. That’s a good ad.

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If you need help with your newspaper design, contact me at News Design School.

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We all know about shrinking newsroom staffs, ad sales and circulation numbers. That’s pretty old news by now. But newspaper designers are facing their own special challenges as more and more papers are moving from the broadsheet format — which itself has been shrinking toward the proportions of a reporter’s notebook — to the tabloid.

Readers seem to prefer the smaller size, and unlike media professionals, don’t seem to equate tabs to yellow journalism. Advertisers have been slower to embrace the tab. That frightens me a bit, because I believe a successful newspaper is going to have to please advertisers first, then bring the readers along.

But it hasn’t stopped at the tab. Papers in Europe, which seems to be leading the way in newspaper innovation, have devolved to the Berliner format (basically an 11 by 17) or even A4 size, the European equivalent of our letter-sized paper. The A4 is 8.3 by 11.7 inches.

But it doesn’t stop there. Jacek Utko, a Polish designer who gained some fame this year for a talk at the weekly TED conference (watch it at http://tinyurl.com/dc8l7y) , believes that newspapers, and those who design them, need to think even smaller, all the way down to mobile phones.

As with the move from bulky broadsheet to tab, the push is from readers who want portability and ease of use. People today are permanently attached, it seems, to their mobile phones, which are used more like portable information and communication devices than as telephones. The iPhone, for instance, is a great little text machine and web browser, but not so good as a phone. People don’t care. The phone part is secondary to them.

Tomorrow’s designer will have to create a structure for the news on less newsprint than ever before, and on web sites, digital readers (e.g., Kindle) and mobile phones.

When it comes to size, bigger may be better, but smaller appears to be winning the newspaper race.

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If you need help with your newspaper design, contact me at News Design School.

This post in streaming audio. Right-click to download.

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I think more fundamental is whether we decide what newspapers are. Are they truly the Fourth Estate, providing a valuable function in a democratic society by watching over governmental bodies and politicians for the rest of us? Or are they fundamentally advertising businesses, brokering connections between sellers and buyers?

If it’s the latter, then we certainly have to give up on the current mode of operations in which newspapers care about readers too much, almost over advertisers, their primary financial supporter. If readers don’t like ads on the front page and section fronts, tough luck. Businesses like it.

True, one needs to provide some content that appeals to a large body of readers, but you can’t please everyone. The AJC learned that following its recent redesign. Readers complained loud and long about all sorts of things, but the idea is to keep advertisers happy first, then readers. That’s just the way it is. The Times (and the Journals and the Posts, etc.) they are a-changing. BTW, I still think the paid content model will slowly gain traction.

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