The world as it should be

Are we heading toward a world of the image and leaving the word behind? It is a distinct possibility.

In a long essay at The New Atlantis web site, Christine Rosen presents some intriguing ideas about what the ascendacy of the image over the word may mean. One point that Rosen covers is the easy falsification of reality through photographs and software such as Adobe’s PhotoShop. It used to be that a photo caught the world with complete accuracy. But now, with digital cameras and programs like PhotoShop, what we presume to be reality can quickly and easily be manipulated and, therefore, the meaning altered.

Mitchell Stephens, a professor at NYU and author of The Rise of the Image, the Fall of the Word, suggests something even scarier: he says that in the future, people will read and write less, relying instead on images “as the predominant means of mental transport.” Sounds too much like Fahrenheit 451 to me.

Granted, a picture may be worth a thousand words, but a manipulated picture is a different (dare I say it?) story altogether. I think manipulation of another’s thoughts is more easily accomplished by the image, in part because humans are visual animals and soak up image information voraciously, and in part because today, “image is everything.” As Rosen points out, there was that old Canon camera ad campaign with Andre Agassi saying that exact phrase. We are told to dress with success, that first impressions (i.e., before someone really gets to know you), and we ignore the admonition that we “can’t judge a book by its cover.” Apple’s iPod is a best seller, not because it’s the best product or best buy, but because of its looks, its image.

Images are powerful, more powerful than words in today’s nearly post-literate world. With their power comes this ease of manipulation, which scares me. Thinking takes words. Those with command of the language will be better equipped to recognize when someone is trying to manipulate them. Those who rely on images will be more easily fooled.

Rosen has some great examples — it’s well worth reading if you are involved with the presentation of information. Click on that link up above.

Now, instead of feeling somehow inferior that my web site has few images and is mostly words, I am going to feel good about it. I’m doing my small part in putting a finger in the dike.

You ever notice that whenever anyone agrees with you, he or she becomes “the voice of reason?” People who disagree, are, of course, idiots or at least severely misguided.

Anyway, I have been ranting for years that cutting newsroom budgets to try to stanch the downward spiralling circulation figures and attendant financial bleeding is seriously wrongheaded. This past week, Kathleen Parker, a Tribune Media Services columnist, wrote a column that supports my contention that, in Zen-like fashion, worrying so much about the bottom line ruins the bottom line.

“By cutting newsroom staffs, the corporate suits are reducing the likelihood that papers can do what makes them necessary,” Parker said. “Instead of cutting where it counts to satisfy shareholders, corporate honchos should be infusing newsrooms with more money to hire more staff. . . .”

As I have said before, cutting staff from the newsroom is like taking people off your production line and then wondering why production numbers are down.

Parker: “When revenues go down, the calculator crowd reasons, you cut costs. But to those in the trenches, cutting staff is exactly the wrong decision, more like a self-inflicted wound trending toward suicide than a remedy.”

I would really love to see a publisher have the guts to say to shareholders: wait for it, this investment will pay off handsomely in the long run, even though immediate numbers might not look good. Other businesses do it all the time.

Why won’t newspapers listen to the voice(s) of reason?

I am in the midst of yet another web site redesign. I have been concerned about type size for the body and whether I should use the navigation links down the left or in a horizontal bar below the header. Naturally, I did a little research.

Checked out the web a bit and, of course, went to Jakob Nielsen’s web site and also checked out the journals. Seems that my own observations are shared: type is often too small or doesn’t have enough contrast against the background or both.

This is another place where the graphic designers have pushed “looking cool” over “ease of use.” Nielsen suggests at least 10-pt and maybe 12 would be better for us aging boomers or for the folks who have their monitors set at a high resolution. Nielsen himself uses quite large — even funkily large — type on his web site.

A 2004 study in Human Factors found that 12 was better then 10, especially if there were a lot of links and other content on the page (“clutter”). The study also found that links were more quickly found when they were on the left and when there were fewer links and less overall clutter. So it seems that scrolling is apparently preferable to jamming a lot onto one screen. This also helps cut down on clutter. I think even Nielsen’s page would benefit from fewer links. Also, the study found that changing type size alone did little to decrease search times.

So I think I will use a horizontal bar for the major links, use the left area for sublinks and comments, and put a “crumb trail” at the top of the main part of the page. Also, I am going to experiment with proportional type sizes so that the type will adjust to the individual user’s settings.

Check out robertbohle.com by Jan 1.

Recently the news has been filled with negative stories about the newspaper industry. I’m not even talking about Conrad Black’s hand in his own till.

Knight-Ridder is suffering financially. The National Newspaper Association reports that weekday circulation is down 2.6% and Sundays down 3.1%. On its web site Editor&Publisher reported that an estimated 1,900 jobs have been cut this year. Although I haven’t found anywhere that reports how many of those lost jobs were newsroom jobs, my guess is that a decent chunk of them were.

Now, at the same time, a number of newspaper groups, again from E&P, report increases in revenue or ad lineage (or how much advertising they received). Some samples:

• McClatchy ad revenue up 3.4% in Oct.
• Tribune’s Oct. ad revenue up slightly
• Lineage at WSJ up 1.1%
• Scripps up slightly in Oct.
• Newspaper ad revenue for Gannett inches up in Oct.

Granted, we don’t know what the other side of the ledger book looks like, but the seeming discrepancy stands out to me. Revenues are up (Yea, say the stockholders), but it is still not enough, so pink slips must be handed out. The newsrooms I know of are stretched pretty thin. But publishers, instead of improving the product, cut budgets and personnel.

Based on my understanding of the newspaper business model, you get your money from businesses who want access to the eyeballs of your readers. The more readers the better. Do you think for one minute circulation would go up if the ads were “better” or if there were a few more? I know readers wouldn’t want a paper without ads, but I believe that they purchase the paper mainly because of what is in the newshole. So that’s your product.

As I have been saying for nearly 20 years, you have to deliver to your customers something they want to buy. It has to be easy, relevant and pleasureable, the last because media use is largely leisure or “play” time.

This is why I think the international movement to the tabloid and Berliner sizes is good. I also like what the folks at the Readership Institute suggest through their “Experience Newspaper” study. I may be naive, but I truly think that if you create the right content, approached the right way, and design it well in an appropriate format, they will come. Make it essential to their lives, make it easy, and even make it fun.

The fact that online newspapers are healthy and well-used, even by those younger cohorts, supports this.

So why do we get newsroom budget and personnel cuts and the same ol’ newspaper (maybe redesigned), probably put out by what would have been a skeleton crew 30 years ago? Why not invest in your product’s (news and entertainment) manufacturing process (the newsroom) to make it better?

Maybe I don’t understand the newspaper business model after all. All I know is it’s all so depressing.

I think CNN made a big mistake in putting Silver Boy, er, Golden Boy Anderson Cooper in the 10 p.m. slot and letting Aaron Brown go. I was no big fan of Brown initially, but my wife liked him and tuning in to CNN became a habit at our house. I grew to appreciate his sincerity and apparent humility. I thought he asked good, honest questions.

I gather that CNN is desperate to catch up with FOX in the ratings. I thought Cooper’s 360 show was how CNN wanted to grow its young audience. Putting him on at 7 was smarter than at 10. At seven, the young crowd is still near a tube, probably eating a dinner of cold pizza over the sink. At 10, they are partying or seeing a movie or playing video games. They are not watching TV news.

Only we newsroom relics are watching news at that hour. As we prepare for bed. I say Bad Move, but we’ll see. . . .

Other projects (ones that pay!) have stepped up and I must stop this for awhile. I will catch up and be back soon. I am sure both my regular readers will be disappointed. Sorry.

(Been away for a week)

I have spent much of the past several months reading and thinking about design and what it means to design something. Just been too busy to write about it.

Before I get more deeply into it later this week, I just have to share something that recently seeped into my brain.

I have been following the discussions about evolution vs. intelligent design, in part because I have long been interested in the nature and beginning of our universe, the mysteries of the sub-atomic world, quantum physics, and so on.

Initially the concept of intelligent design appealed to me because it satisfied both the scientific and spiritual sides of me. But the other day, it hit me: the term is a redundancy. If anything is designed, from the universe to a blogger’s page to a newspaper, it is the result of an intelligence with a plan. Even bad design (and there’s w-a-a-a-y too much of that around), is the result of an intelligence with a plan, a blueprint. Randomness can create, but it can’t design.

So that’s why I can’t use the term intelligent design any more. The second word includes the first. The editor in me now cringes.

More design thoughts TK.

The excellent web site I Want Media recently posted an interview with Andrew Gowers, head honcho at London’s Financial Times. The paper was labelled recently the world’s best newspaper following an international survey of opinion leaders.

While that title should be open to a broader discussion of the criteria used, the FT is clearly a terrific paper, despite that newsprint color.

What caught my attention was his comment: “We have no plans to go tabloid, for a host of good reasons. In my view the tabloid format dumbs journalism down — it oversimplifies complex issues and emphasizes froth over substance.”

How in the heck can a format be responsible for bad journalism? True, in the minds of the Great Unwashed around the world, the term”tabloid journalism” has a pejorative spin, but it is irresponsible for a media baron to go along with it. It is true that many tab-sized “news” products are pretty awful, but are they really newspapers? Does the Great Unwashed make that connection? I doubt it.

Given that a move to a smaller format for most broadsheets is almost inevitable if paper products are to remain viable, reinforcing the tabloid myth now might be terrible timing.

I am pretty sure the good tab newspapers don’t “dumb down” the news just because the page is smaller, just as I am fairly certain that magazines such as The Atlantic don’t dumb down content because of a mere 8 1/2 by 11 inch size.

The trick is to prepare people for the future new sizes by slowly getting rid of the myth. Maybe the problem will take care of itself as more and more broadsheets make the switch to tabloid or even Berliner format.

Newspaper circulation figures continue to fall. Since a high of nearly 63 million daily newspaper readers in 1985, the numbers are an exercise in subtraction. This is especially so among the 18-34 age group. Reading even just once during a week among that cohort fell to under 40 percent in 2004.

These losses came despite content changes aimed at women and that younger cohort. Some of this move away from solid news coverage to pop culture coverage and info graphics the size of a Volkswagen (while the news hole lost more space to advertising) was aimed at stopping the circulation decline.

A lot of the design changes newspapers have made in the past 30 years, some quite costly, have been made specifically to draw in the young. I have always wanted to do a ROI study of newspaper redesigns, but figured I wouldn’t get accurate numbers from publishers, so why bother? In the aggregate, it must not be working, as the numbers show.

But a whole new career field called newspaper design evolved from trying to solve the circulation problem. As an aesthetic exercise, it has been wonderful: newspapers are much better organized and more attractive than 50 years ago. Then, people did page “makeup” for hot type and basically chose between ugly cuts of Bodoni or Futura for headlines. No color. Awful photo reproduction.

As a business exercise, it has to be called a failure, based on circulation figures. Worse yet, the Boomers’ eyesight continues to get worse, and since they haven’t really saved for retirement, that Gazette subscription will have to go. Then we’ll all eventually die off.

Then that downward staircase of yearly circulation figures will turn into cliffs. When the Boomers are mostly gone, newspapers will be — will have to be — different. Maybe the “paper” part of the word will have to go (or it will be weird, like how we still say “dial” a phone number even though rotary phones are long gone).

All that being said, I not only love newspapers still, I love newspaper design. I just wish it had worked better.

NEWS ITEM: Five universities and two foundations recently (May 28) announced a collaborative plan to bolster journalism education.

Normally competitors, the institutions using $4.1 million from the Carnegie Corporation and the Knight Foundation over the next two years to join forces will be the journalism schools of Columbia University, Northwestern University, the University of California at Berkeley, and the University of Southern California and Harvard University’s Joan Shorenstein Center for Press, Politics and Public Policy. The universities have already pledged another $2 million in the third year to continue the collaboration.
(citation below)
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It seems to me there is a disconnect between what this project is aiming for and what the average j-school and students need, and I can’t wait to get the details. It’s a bit of an “inside the beltway”mentality, it seems to me. If we wanted to improve the productivity of the average American worker, would we toss our money only at Wal-Mart, GM, Nike and the like?

I believe that some of the more important issues won’t be studied in depth, if at all:

(a) Most journalism programs are joined at the hip with advertising and/or public relations. While this may be good for student numbers and therefore dollars, those students can be a drag on a good journalism curriculum.
(b) Journalism schools are increasingly unable to hire talented working journalists, even to teach the skills classes, if they don’t hold the Ph.D. That’s becoming a huge problem.
(c) Too many faculty members are way behind the curve technologically, which is not only where the field is going, it is important as we try to attract more and better students, who often see print journalism as boring. I know some j-profs, for instance, who don’t know what a blog is.
(d) ACEJMC, the accrediting body, is not as relevant, important and influential as it should be. Or maybe accreditation is not as important as we think it is. Only one in four programs is accredited today. I agree with the accreditation guidelines generally. I just think the group is slow to adjust to meet the quickly changing media environment and provide support for programs under various pressures from ill-informed administrators. It also is not flexible enough for smaller programs with unusual institutional challenges.
(e) Out here in the apparent hinterlands of journalism education, most students work 15-20 hours a week and many are working full-time jobs. Then journalism programs suggest or require a 20-hrs-per week internship, probably for no pay, in preparation for a job that pays worse than a full-time pizza delivery driver. Tough to get a lot of talented students interested.

I hope these high-powered foundations and deans remember to look into what the little guys need. We could use some help, too.

Story link:

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2005/05/27/carnegie