Writing, editing, design

I recently attended a conference about new forms of storytelling for newspapers. This included, of course, changes aimed for the digital version: blogs, podcasts, vodcasts and the like. Speakers also addressed new ways of presenting news and information in the dead-trees (print) version of the newspaper.

At first I was quite taken and excited by the approaches, but some of the glow has waned for me. As I watched the front page of my local daily (The Florida Times-Union) slowly morph from a news-filled space to one filled with teases to American Idol, lists, blurbs, pullouts, links to online surveys for reader input, etc., it occurred to me that many alternate story forms meant a dumbing down of the information, much like the comic books of classic novels I read in my youth.

Newspapers are at a difficult crossroads. On one hand, if they keep to the traditional narrative (OK, a few embellishments are allowed), they may well lose readers as the intellectually lazy (note, I didn’t say dumber) generations behind the boomers hit newspaper subscription age. If circulation figures continue their downward spiral, more and more papers will bite the dust.

On the other hand, if they continue the ALT/dumbing down of the content, not only will they lose their souls, but the moves will probably hasten the decline in the print product, not save it. Maybe that’s inevitable and OK. As I have said before, I believe most print newspapers will continue to shrink and end up as weekly products that largely summarize and provide links to web sites, in much the same way TV Guide drives traffic to television.

Unfortunately I have no recommendation other than think v-e-r-y carefully before you buy into the ALTs (some of which have been around and infrequently used for decades, but that’s for another post).

The Pew Research Center released a report a few days ago about the journalists people admired the most. The person named most often was Katie Couric, but that was by only 5 percent of those surveyed. Forty-four percent didn’t — or couldn’t — name anyone. That’s a sad state of affairs.

What I found even more amazing was that 2 percent named Jon Stewart as their most admired journalist. What the….? Stewart says all the time he’s not a real journalist, but there you go.

I find that even worse than Bill O’Reilly’s second place finish with 4 percent! Let’s say that word again, newsies: journalebrities.

The actual question asked of just over 1,000 people was: Thinking about the news, what journalist or news person do you most admire? I can’t tell if the survey covered just TV and radio journalists, but I have to ask about newspaper journalists. Could the average person name one, short of perhaps Bob Woodward? I doubt it.

Who’s your most admired journalist?

The Los Angeles Times, one of the biggest and best newspapers in the country, announced Jan. 25 that from thence forward the paper’s website latimes.com would become the focus of its news efforts. As editor James E. O’Shea put it, he wanted the paper’s journalists to view the web site, and not the dead-tree version, as the paper’s “primary vehicle for delivering news.”

In the same Times story, the writer notes that the Wall Street Journal already has moved most of its breaking news stories to its web site, saving more analytic stories for print editions.

I am sure smaller and more mobile newspapers moved in this direction a while ago. I have been saying for a year or so now that the print edition will continue to shrink and become an information tease or booster for the web site in the same way TV Guide boosts television and helps us connect with what we want to see on the tube.

The fact that papers such as the Journal and now the L.A. Times are taking a web first attitude tells me we are arriving at a tipping point toward newspaper web sites and away from print as we know it. Print will stay awhile, but it will be different.

Oh. The Times staffer in charge of training Times journos in ways of the web, Business Editor Russ Stanton, was one of my college journalism students in the late 70s. Well done, Russ, and good luck.

“Think like a writer,” said Craig Cook in a post on his blog, A List Apart. Interestingly, he was speaking to web designers.

“Presentational thinking,” he said, “leads to presentational web design, to the detriment of your content.” In other words, if you are worried only about how your design looks instead of how it opens access to the content, how it supports the meaning of the content, then you aren’t doing it right.

Writers deal with meaning in all they do. Some designers, however, think of design as sort of a cosmetic add-on to something already created, with little regard to what the content is all about. This creates a less-than-optimum product. As I have been saying — nay, preaching — for nearly 20 years is that the best information product integrates writing and presentation (design) with the reader in mind — as always.

Designers shouldn’t think like writers – writers and designers should thinking like communicators – those interested in meaning transfer. Isn’t that what communication is all about?

My best friend, my 3-year-old chocolate lab, Nika, was diagnosed with cancer in July. Chemotherapy and care from a terrific oncologist bought us some time, but not enough.

We let her go on Dec. 29.

I am just catching up with some summer reading, including the July Editor&Publisher, in which a story covers 10 papers that “do it right.” Included is the Bakersfield Californian, which hired an outside consultant to lead the staff in a redesign of the paper.

The high-profile consultant no doubt commanded a pile of dough for the work, but did it grow the business? Initially, yes, though it may have been the Hawthorne effect at work. Single-copy sales were up 13 percent, according to E&P, and subscription stops (starts weren’t reported, so they probably weren’t good) were down 20 percent. There were an estimated 8,000 stops in 2005, from a circulation around 65,000 or so.

After the initial buzz wore off, circulation leveled off, despite the redesign and major content changes. The Census web site reports the Bakersfield area is growing to the tune of nearly 10,000 folks per year. So penetration continues to decline.

I don’t mean to pick on the Californian (I did some design consulting for them many years ago, and no, I don’t know if it helped the biz!!!). But I do wonder if all the format, design and content changes in the dead-trees newspaper product really are worth the time and effort. I have been threatening to do a research project along these lines, and maybe I should. One day.

Coming soon: More on Design and Design Darwinisn.

Good design, obviously, has both legs and one other attribute that I call Design Morphogenesis. One good definition of morphogenesis is “The process in complex system-environment exchanges that tends to elaborate a system’s given form or structure. Examples are …evolution and learning. A morphogenic system is capable of maintaining its continuity and integrity by changing essential aspects of its structure or organization.”

Rather like Darwin’s finches, good designs follow the dictum of form must follow function, i.e., the form (or design) must spring naturally from the functional needs of the artifact, whether it is a chair, a web page or a newspaper. And also like the variety of finches on different Galapagos islands, good design must adapt as functional needs change.

Since I work mainly in the field of newspaper design, allow me to go there for an example. Years ago Long Island’s Newsday went with the tabloid format, despite its bad reputation for “yellow journalism,” because most of its readers wanted to read it on the train into Manhattan each day. The tab format is much easier to read on a train than a broadsheet, like the New York Times. Form follows function.

One can see this good/bad design dichotomy all around: sticking with newspapers, let’s compare the design of The Hartford Courant, The Boston Globe or Germany’s Die Zeit with that of the local fishwrap. It is clear that (a) functionally/structurally they are all alike, and (b) aesthetically, there is a wide gap. You can see the design gap everywhere you look: buildings, advertisements, cars, clothes.

The problem is that too many people involved appear to be missing the gene for aesthetics. But because the ability to design is so widespread, Design Darwinism doesn’t have the chance to operate: the hordes of bad simply overwhelm the good. How does this happen? That brings us to memes.

According to memecentral.com, “Memes are the basic building blocks of our minds and culture, in the same way that genes are the basic building blocks of biological life.” In other words memes extend Darwinian evolution to our culture and our minds. Once a mutant meme, or idea, enters our culture, it can spread like a virus, especially in today’s techno-mediacentric world.

For instance, at the beginning of the 20th century, it was considered good to be pale. Having a sun tan meant that you were a poor, lower-class soul, doomed to work outside as a common laborer. Then somehow the meme mutated and the opposite became true. Now people try purposefully to get as tanned as possible, using tanning salons and tanning creams, both of which would have been incomprehensible a century or so ago. Culture adapted to the needs of the new meme, spread largely by the media.

For my money, the worst recent design meme was desktop publishing. Once the Mac and PageMaker hit the world, everybody – even the “one-legged” people – truly believed that they could design quality print pieces. Soon, the ugly overwhelmed the good and the world of graphic design has never been the same. The equivalent has happened in other design. Not that I am a neo-Luddite, but I lay the blame at the feet of technology, that great leveler of true talent.

Technology has allowed the bad to surpass the good by putting tools in the hands of people who shouldn’t be allowed to design.

Darwin’s finches wouldn’t have survived, despite their impressive adaptability, if a competitor had the tools to drive most of them off the island. Good design has failed to drive out the bad because technology allows its greater numbers to overwhelm.

And we two-legged designers continue to shake our heads and suffer.

Design is a ubiquitous human undertaking. Nearly every human artifact is touched by someone involved in its design. Buildings are designed. So are newspapers, corkscrews, business cards, road signs, home interiors, web pages, freeway interchanges, tools, furniture, software interfaces, golf clubs, coffee pots, and so on.

But what actually is design? Is it a professional field? A craft? A philosophy? Why isn’t design alone a discipline in academe? People studying design almost immediately break off into balkanized and narrow fields, such as graphic design, interior design, furniture design, automotive design, human-computer interface design, among many others.
Perhaps most important, Why is there so much BAD design?

Look around and pay attention: printed pieces you can barely read, uncomfortable (and homely) chairs, lamps with the switches hidden out of sight under the shade, buildings that lead one to believe a door is where there is none, car dashboards with important gauges hidden by the windshield wiper lever, electronics with all the connections in the back, voting machines/ballots in Florida, among thousands of others.

Like beauty, bad design might be in the eye of the beholder, but bad design is more easily and widely agreed upon than, for instance, bad art. It also seems to me that bad design is more prevalent than good, the opposite of what one would think or hope for. In other words there is no such thing as “Design Darwinism,” i.e., only the fittest survive. With the law of the Design Jungle, most of the strong survive, but lots of the weak make it as well.

One reason that Design Darwinism (unfortunately) doesn’t hold true is that design is inherent in everything; it is a natural part of everything made by humankind. And, unlike its cousin art, it is an activity that can be performed by nearly anyone. But because it is a bifurcated concept, with one part accessible to anyone and the other not, failures happen with alarming – and often unpleasant – regularity.

The two parts of design are necessary for good design to occur. I call the two parts functional/structural and aesthetic. Neither is sufficient alone. They are two parts of a greater whole, as with the two halves of scissors. One without the other is virtually useless. Useless for good design, that is; bad design uses only one.

The problem with bad design is that it focuses on the functional/structural and ignores the aesthetic, or sometimes vice versa. The chair I am suffering on as I type is structurally just like the Eames Lounge Chair: splayed out legs with a central pedestal supporting a seat, a separate back piece and two arms. Aesthetically, however, the two are miles apart. Mine was no doubt created by no more than a journeyman. Charles Eames was a master.

So bad design is usually created by people who understand only half of good design, and there are many, many more of those than good designers. Sort of like an architect who understands all the engineering aspects of a building – load bearing capacities and the like – but has no ability to please the eye. Unlike art, which is largely hidden away in museums, designed artifacts are all around us and we all are forcibly exposed to the bad choices made by “one-legged” designers.

More next post…

This post is really going to be about the future of newspapers, but I couldn’t resist the headline. A national media organization recently told me I wasn’t suited for a position with them because I, as an academic, couldn’t hack the pace of a job in the “real” world!!! I wouldn’t mind trying a job that didn’t work me 7 days a week (albeit just 10 months a year, and the “real” job was 11 mos.), one that didn’t require me to teach three classes per term, each with many hours of prep, grading and student meetings. Add in developing new classes and curricula, departmental meetings, committee meetings and reports, mentoring of new faculty, my own writing ( book and three articles at present), my work as volunteer webmaster for the local IABC chapter, answering student e-mails, helping the student newspaper with design, doing my own reading to keep up in a rapidly changing field, writing occasionally in this blog, writing letters of recommendation for current and former students, and on and on.

Right now, a “real job” sounds pretty good! Talk about misguided….

On to the newspaper biz, which is still struggling with the idea that if it ain’t in ink on crushed, dead trees, it’s none of their business. Many papers are slow to catch on, and the non-profit organizations supposedly guiding them into the future can’t seem to do so.

W. Russell Neumann (another lowly professor) said way back in 1991 that newspapers should be thinking about taking the money spent on the print product and invest it in online content.( from Philip Meyer’s article in the Charlotte Observer, 6/27). I had said basically the same thing a few years earlier. So the content problem was noted years ago. Even the classified ad problem has been around for years, but the newspaper industry has been slow to move, a potentially serious error.

Craigslist has been gnawing away at the valuable classified ad franchise previously held by newspapers, and the site just announced the addition of 100 more cities. More sites, such as Postadshere.com are joining the fray. Yet many newspapers seem unable to adjust to meet the challenge. Newspapers clearly could control the local class ads market because no other medium is better situated to control the local media market. Period. Losing classified ad income could be deadly for the print product. Where’s the help?

Perhaps a more important bleeding is the loss of readers, again despite the best efforts of industry organizations to lead the way in growing the audience. Readership has fallen steadily from a high of 80 percent in 1964 to just over 50 percent today. You can’t just expect to move the lost print product readers online, at least without some changes in content. The old “shovelware” model just doesn’t work. Eli Noam, in an excellent Financial Times article (6/22, ft.com), points out that to offset a 5 percent drop in print circulation, news organizations would have to grow total online and print readership by 50 percent annually to break even.

Noam also says that what newspapers need to do is differentiate their product line and step away from focusing only on the traditional print product, something I have been saying for years (see 4/18 post, below). It’s not that young readers abhor news, they just prefer receiving it in non-print ways. Noam says that a bright future awaits those news organizations (N.B.: not newspapers) “that can differentiate their product, establish brand identity, and function as an integrator and filter.” In other words, get better online and consider new, even free, print products.

I don’t see this in the near future for the vast majority of newspapers, er, news organizations. What little help and leadership they are getting from the news associations seems aimed mostly at large circulation papers. Pity. Most newspapers in this country are small.

Finally, I ran across a news tidbit that said that the Belo group is going to increase operating expenses 12 percent as they diversify their product line. What? A company actually willing to think long-term success instead of keeping shareholders happy with short-term profits? Now that’s news. I am going to keep a close eye on Belo to see if it succeeds. You should, too.

Oh, but ignore all of the above thoughts . . . . I am only a professor.

In an American Journalism Review article next month, we get to revisit whose news judgment should rule, the editor’s or the readers.’ You know, the old discussion of giving readers what they should know vs. what they want to know.

Because I am old enough to have set type in Gutenberg’s shop (well, at least I worked during the hot type era), I remember the days when the news values of the newsroom held total sway. Readers got what they got and that was that. News and information were not looked at as commodities as they are now. The newspaper was simply something you bought without much thought and took it as it was, sort of like water from the tap. And few people above the poverty line even considered not getting a paper or two, much like they would not think twice about hooking up to city water.

Then came the newsroom’s “dirty word”: marketing. It was only talked about in disgusted whispers. Some simply said the “m-word.” Most saw it as turning the paper over to the readers.
Then reality hit. Newspaper circulation went flat, prior to beginning a steady, slow descent.

All sorts of reasons were cited, but few editors were able to face the new reality of the information marketplace: readers had choices. I was one of the slow ones to leave the “m-word” camp, too. But as the net and other technologies have increased their hold on our lives and the market share, it has become obvious that the audience must be catered to.

I don’t think this means a dumbing down of the product, as many once feared. It does mean choosing better (and sometimes different) stories, telling better stories and using all the various technologies to their fullest. Cross-pollinate across technologies: drive people to your web site through the print product and drive people to the print product through the web site. And don’t forget cell phones, PDAs and iPods. If you do it well and count those people as readers, circulation probably would be UP.

So who calls the shots? The editor must, of course, but s/he must always make decisions with the reader in mind. It’s really their product.