News designers at the forefront of journalism trends

INDIANAPOLIS -- If designers were fauna, they'd be cats.

Calico.

Also Abyssinian, Siamese, tiger and all the rest -- commanding attention, sure of themselves, quick on their feet.

Ready to pounce.

I had worked with artists and designers when I played in the majors, at The Sun in Baltimore, but I had never spent two days soaking up their culture.

That's what I did Oct. 18-19, at the annual conference of the just-renamed Society for News Design in Indianapolis. An organization with more than 2300 members in nearly 50 countries, SND drew more than 650 people to Indiana's capital, where there was "no beach, no mountains, just ideas and some corn."

Each day had workshops, critique sessions, schmoozing and recruiting. (The Sun was there, with Assistant Managing Editor Joe Hutchinson trying to line up design directors for news and features, as well as a graphics director and staff designers and artists.)

I learned a lot.

Without content, designers have naught.

From section fronts to individual elements to pages on the World-Wide Web, speakers pressed this point in workshops and sessions throughout the lengthy two days of Sindy, as it was nicknamed.

"Storytelling" is the objective of designers, who have become presentation editors and been welcomed to lead teams that include reporters, photographers, artists and wordsmiths.

As a word person, I had long thought of design as an isolated box -- the infographic. In a session tagged "Why Information Graphics Work," former Milwaukee Journal Graphics Editor Eric Meyer explored the impact of this, the self-contained storyteller.

"It's the way cave people talked to each other," said Meyer, now a visiting lecturer on the journalism faculty at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. "We understand graphics instantly -- there's no adding up the parts to make a message."

As a presentation tool, graphics can be ideal, he said -- but only if the presenter recognizes that "storytelling is the heart of it all," and then tailors the graphic to the reader's expectations.

"We need to worry about what the likely audience is for our graphics," he said.

With his digital presentation locked in its can by technical problems (a common problem for session hosts at this hotel), Meyer verbally pointed to USA Today, whose front-page "chartoon" is inviting by being vivid, and frequently dispenses information no one needs.

"They expect that the vivid graphic will be entertaining," Meyer said. Consequently, "a graphic on taxes may work less well with an illustration" because the reader is conditioned to attach different expectations to tables than to drawings or images.

Making graphics happen is not simply a mouse-and-screen task, Meyer said. "The best graphics come from early-on synergy," getting ideas for text and graphics squared away before designing and writing.

"The function of a graphic is not to get people to read stories," Meyer said. "It's to communicate information."

Some papers have pulled back from graphics, notably the North Jersey Herald & News of Passaic, N.J.

Once "a kind of a Wall Street Journal with color photos," the Herald & News was the lead example of "Small Newspaper Success Stories" as told by Brian Stallcop, managing editor of The Sun, a not-minuscule 40,000-circulation evening daily in Bremerton, Wash.

The New Jersey paper's front page "went retro," Stallcop said -- and local, with a bigger headline and local photo "cropped well, with good image size."

"They decided to write good headlines" on an increased story count, he noted, and the changes meant "single copy sales went up 10 percent overnight."

Another paper recorded a remarkable circulation jump this year -- Stallcop's. He attributed a 13 percent increase since spring to making over the paper as Bremerton's own.

"We started a daily local business page, expanded sports, added zoned sections," he said. High school sports came front and center; a reworked sports agate page recognized that "readers love complete box scores."

Classifieds, too: This high-readership section "doesn't have to be ugly," Stallcop declared. The Sun uses color on its class front to brighten the index.

An inside page called Yourtown is a compendium of news to be used -- road work warnings, events, "an extra photo from some other time in the week," he explained, adding, "People buy the Yourtown pix."

In sum, the changes the former photojournalist and Virginian-Pilot news editor took from Norfolk, Va., to the Pacific Northwest led to one thing: "People said you paid attention to us."

Smaller papers will have high impact, Stallcop said in his critique session, if "their reach is not exceeding their grasp." A prime example: the 8000-circulation weekly Jackson Hole (Wyo.) News, a tabloid "with little touches of elegance." He noted that one image in the Wyoming paper changed every week: the sig on the front page columnist.

A news staff of barely double digits ("in a newsroom that small, there's no place to hide") produces a paper with appealing photos chosen for their large image size. "It's not that the photo had to be big," he said, "but the image in the photo was big."

This technique was employed well in other papers Stallcop critiqued, especially in promo photos either across the top of the front or down column one.

Good use of images was on the mind, too, of Steve Dorsey, a design editor at the Lexington (Ky.) Herald-Leader.

A good page features "a neat and biting image," Dorsey said. "Strip away as much as you can" in selecting elements for a page, he suggested; "don't go too far" in using such things as type and white space.

Another speaker to tie design to sales, Dorsey explained that his paper "compromised" in its coverage of the victorious hometown University of Kentucky basketball team. A six-column picture of a team member holding aloft the Ncaa trophy had type on it "because we wanted to save the rack."

"If we had put the head over the picture," he said, "the rack would have shown only a hand holding up the trophy."

A different kind of rack lies ahead for many publishers: the World-Wide Web.

In his keynote address, design consultant and Poynter Institute associate Mario Garcia extolled the joys of going on-line while reminding his lunchtime listeners that "what doesn't change is how the story is to be told." The same three ways stories are told on paper -- with print, photos and reefers -- apply on-line.

"What do you want the reader to see first, second, third?" he asked. Noting that the designer's job "is to create the easiest way to move from one sequence to the next," he explained that while newspaper pages are read diagonally, web pages "have a totally different kind of movement."

Web pages are carved into three units from top to bottom, with each read from left to right. Thus, a good web page -- like CNN Interactive -- has a color bar down the left side as an anchor, a starting point for the eye.

In creating a web page, Garcia said, "don't abandon anything you did" in the print world in gathering content, but be prepared to blaze a new trail on-line.

"You have greater freedoms than you ever had in making changes in a newspaper," he said. "You don't have any history to overcome."

Do avoid "type attacks," where the page has more type than anything else. "This is not printed matter -- don't make it look like printed matter," he said.

Garcia noted that opening pages of successful web sites feature images, not words: "Don't begin with an immediate menu of stories, but a picture of the city."

And enjoy the freedom from headaches web pages afford: "Color is divine -- you don't have to worry about color reproduction, you don't have to go home and worry about what will happen to that food page that was so wonderful on your Mac screen."

On your screen, yes, but the second keynote speaker took exception to the supposed uniformity of World-Wide Web tones.

"What is a browser-safe color?" asked Nanette Bisher, deputy editor of new media for the Orange County Register in Southern California. "It doesn't seem to be safe on any of our monitors."

That woe aside, Bisher highlighted the exciting prospects of working in a new medium and the impact it would have on newsrooms.

"It's time to reinvent the wheel," she said and change how a publication's departments interact. "Advertising is not a dirty word, marketing could be fun -- things we've never talked about in the newsroom."

Newsrooms are evolving, rapidly and radically.

In his session on "Team Building," Assistant Managing Editor Gary Graham detailed the introduction of newsroom teams at the Wichita Eagle.

In abandoning a traditional newsroom structure, the Knight-Ridder paper in Kansas' largest city "blew up the copy desk," Graham said. Now, each team has a mix of people who bring diverse skills to the task of gathering content in its many forms and ushering it into print.

"The best thing we've found is that we're getting a lot better stories in the newspaper," he said. "We cover things we didn't cover before."

He cited a story about a bull-riding school that was written after the reporter and photographer conferred about photos; the reporter tailored the lead to flow out of the dominant image in the package. In addition, the team worked with columnists -- who normally appeared on the cover, persuading them to move inside for one day -- and ad side to secure enough space to give the photos the space they deserved.

Another time, a copy editor-turned-reporter produced a "wonderfully written" piece about a teacher who finally got to adopt a troubled child, Graham said. "It never would have gotten in our paper before because no one was looking for that story before," he said.

The introduction of teams -- there are 12, ranging in size from four to 18 people each -- was begun 18 months ago. The work-in-progress has not been painless, Graham said, expressing regret at "not having spent time training on the concept of team work. We tried to catch up four to five months in."

Staffers do grumble. One veteran editor left a year after the project began; others complain of a reluctance to take responsibility. Graham quoted one staffer's solicited feedback:

"We struggle to fill the daily paper more than ever before."

If storytelling is a given, the medium is not.

Detailed to look into the future, Dale Peskin, "veteran deep thinker" and deputy managing editor of the Detroit News, called upon Orson Welles to illustrate his talk.

As writer, director and star of Citizen Kane ("obviously my favorite film"), Peskin said, Welles "developed the first personal web page."

His "achievement in craftsmanship" owed its impact to "an attention to detail that was unprecedented" but it won audiences and critical praise because "the heart of Citizen Kane is still the story."

Turning to the printed page, Peskin displayed his choices for best-designed papers, among them the San Francisco Examiner ("you get a sense of the city in which it's being published"); Times Daily of Florence, Ala. ("it tells the community each day a story, a focal point for that day"), and Anchorage Daily News (its entertainment section called 8 "works in a stunning kind of way").

"Print still works," Peskin said, "and we do a lot of wonderful things in it every day."

While embracing the old and the new, and fearlessly declining to forecast what lies ahead, Peskin offered one caveat: "We confuse technology for journalism."

Fight not to be "preoccupied with the tools," he said. "Names like PowerPC, Photoshop, Illustrator, HTML -- these things have little to do with journalism."

Most telling, he concluded, may be your answer to this question:

"How much time do you spend in your newsroom talking about the technology, versus time spent on talking about telling a story?"

-- Pete Wetmore

"What I try to do is make sure the staff's good ideas get into the newspaper."
-- Brian Stallcop, managing editor, The Sun, Bremerton, Wash. at SND.

"There's a value to graphics beating you over the head."
-- Eric Meyer, visiting lecturer, University of Illinois

"We're not in the newspaper business, we're in the understanding business."
-- Dale Peskin, deputy managing editor, Detroit News

See also, Leisure World-Wide Web and Making models for a living.

From THE COLE PAPERS, November 1996, Copyright © 1996, All Rights Reserved.