Writing, editing, design

The Muse got off the couch long enough the other night to look over my shoulder as I flailed away at the keyboard trying to make cogent thoughts materialize from the flotsam and jetsam of my mind. I not only have brain damage, I think I have mind damage as well.

She still doesn’t understand why she is needed as a see-Alice for my flagging writing abilities.

“What’s the big deal?” she taunted. “So you have these 26 symbols you have to almost randomly group into sound-maps called words that stand for an idea or thing. Then you freight-train those groupings into sentences, paying attention to which cars you attach and/or sequence with other cars. Then you clump all those into paragraphs, which you stack on top of one another like cold cuts on rye, and Boom! You gotta story.”

I stared at her in disbelief.

“You really think it’s that easy to write?” I asked.

“Yeah,” she said, stifling a yawn. “I sometimes wonder why I became a Muse out of college. I mean who needs the frustration? I shoulda gone into public relations.” She headed into the kitchen, no doubt to get a beer. I silently prayed there was only light beer left, which she hates. Some Muse.

I turned back to the keyboard, sans inspiration, and cut open a vein.

I am convinced that dogs and people are involved in much more of a symbiotic relationship than we might think. Of course, if you’re not one of the tribe of Dog People, the whole topic must seem weird to you from the start. I’ll try to explain.

Most people look at the dog-man relationship as one way, as one of subservience,  as dog being taken care of by man. But it also goes the other way. Back in the earliest days of barely domesticated wolf-dogs, man benefited from the presence of dogs. Besides the obvious watchdog and even guard dog functions, dogs also provided companionship, meal scrap clean-up and a hunting partner.

Even today, dogs still gain from the relationship, but man gains as well, especially with certain ones. In the life of every Dog Person is one special dog, that one dog among many that touches the heart in a special way.

There’s a relationship that is hard to explain, but it is best described by love. Not just the love of a pet, but the love of another living being that is trying to understand and please you just as hard as you are trying to understand and share life with it. It’s not simply a pet-and-owner relationship. It’s more.

That’s why, several years after her death from cancer at age 3, I still miss my chocolate lab terribly. She provided something in my life that was missing, and remains missing today. It is a hole in my life. I am not embarrassed to admit it.

And I hate painting. Well, actually it’s not so much the painting, it’s all the prep work. Scraping, sanding, spackling, repairing, ACK!

It’s the same with writing, at least non-fiction. With fiction, you don’t need to worry so much about facts, though internal consistency is important once you get the story going. You just more or less give birth to the characters and let them go. They will create their own facts.

But with non-fiction, there’s fact-gathering (which I always overdo), interviewing, more fact-gathering and checking, more interviewing, collating of notes, rough drafts, editing and yada yada yada.

Depending on the subject, you may even have to re-check facts you have already checked (sound like fun?). For instance, I did a piece on the fire ant a few years ago. The story took a long time to come together, and while I was working on it, new facts came out on the spread of the ant and about a fly that was being used to try to contain the growth of ant colonies. One never knows when the facts will change.

Still, fiction scares me. So much power, so much responsibility. Despite the work, I still think I prefer non-fiction. Too timid for fiction for now.

I have decided to move most of my design posts to my newspaper design site, News Design School. When I talk about design here, it will be more about how writing and design (and editing) work together to enhance communication.

I have a number of writing projects going right now, so stay tuned for the next post, coming soon.

Many newspapers shrank their broadsheet sizes by several inches before moving to tabloid size or even berliner and 8 1/2 by 11. How small will newspapers go?

“Tiny” Agate, R. I.

Dear Tiny: Good question from a Rhode Islander. Most people don’t know it, but, like newspapers,  Rhode Island used to be much larger. In fact, it was so large, its founders considered naming it Rhode Continent. Sadly, revenues began to lag and the state had to cut back, losing most of its size to neighbor states and Canada.

Anyway, to your question. Most experts think that eventually newspapers will achieve the size of singularity, or the infinitely dense and infinitely small single point that many theorize was the size of the universe before the Big Bang.

Experts (and by that term I mean me) have calculated that newspapers will be the size of a paperback book by 2012, a playing card by 2014 and a postage stamp by 2015. Older readers will be mollified with a free magnifying glass with each subscription.

The Society for News Design will create a new category: stamp-size front pages with a circulation of at least seven. The haiku will become the favored format for investigative reporters.

The good news is that the smaller formats will allow newspaper companies to hire back 14 newsworkers of the more than 32,000 who have lost jobs in the past few years. And, of course, all those angels dancing on the head of a pin will have something to read.

Thanks for asking and happy layouts,
Dr. Design

If Dr. Design doesn’t give you the newspaper design answer you need, try contacting me at News Design School.

Three umpires were talking before a game:
“Somes are balls and somes are strikes, and I call ‘em as I see ‘em.”
“Somes are balls and somes are strikes, and I call them as they are.”
“Somes are balls and somes are strikes, but they ain’t nothin’ til I call ‘em.

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, contact me at News Design School.

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Here are some things I think I think about newspaper design.

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 completely 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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I knew the happy days would end. The Muse is back from her trip to Mexico with the semi-famous (at least in his own mind) design advice maven, Dr. Design.

She ambled in, hair totally bird-nested and too unwashed even for dreads. A nearly dead cigarillo didn’t so much hang from between her puffy lips as cantilever there on her lower, stuck by dried saliva. She dropped a pull-tie Hefty bag, no doubt filled with dirty clothes, by the front door and headed for the couch, the left side of which has an indention that exactly matches her butt.

“Hey, Elwood! Got any cold beer?” Don’t know why she calls me Elwood. She dropped what was left of her cigarillo into my Starbucks grande double latte I just brought home with the Sunday New York Times.  She lit another.

“Whadjago deef or somethin? Ya got a cold beer or ya gonna make a run?” She blew a few smoke rings, a small fast one through a slowly moving big one, then fixed me eye-to-eye with a steely glare. I fetched her a beer.

“Thanks, bub.”

My karma must be bad. I asked the Universe for help, for inspiration, for something to end my creative drought, and the next day, she shows up as if from Hell’s temp agency.

“So, tell me. Didja get any work done or did you miss me?”  She flicked an ash toward the Starbucks cup and missed. I hoped the Times wouldn’t catch fire.

“Yeah,” I said with too loud of a sigh, “I did get some writing and web site work done.”

“Good boy, Elwood! Another few months, and maybe all my help will really pay off,” she said, before nearly losing a lung in another of a long line of hacking coughfests. Then she snorted up the excess mucus and drained the beer.

“Ya know what that tasted like?” she asked while actually belching the last word.

“No. I don’t.”

“That tasted just like another one!” she said with unsuppressed glee at her humor. “Just like another one! Ha-ha-ha.”

I don’t think I can make it. Can one fire one’s muse?

(To be continued…)

Newspapers are shrinking faster than a cheap cotton t-shirt in a hot dryer, both in terms of the business and the format. Revenues? Smaller. Circulation? Smaller. Number of pages? Fewer. Format? Smaller.

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.

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Actually, that headline is a bit of a tease.  We already know why they fail: they are owned by big corporations interested mainly in profits, the Internet took all the readers, the economy and blah blah blah. I think the real reason is that they can’t get the paper delivered on time.

At least in my case.

I spent most of the summer reading the Washington Post, so when I came home, the thought of paying money to read my local daily again was a bit painful. I mean, how could it possibly match up? I decided to subscribe to the Wall Street Journal instead.

Then I got a call from a telemarketer with some deals on subscriptions to the local paper, and I was tempted, although before I left town for the summer, the paper was delivered late more often than not. I said I’d think about it; not getting the paper on time irritated me constantly.  The telemarketer said he’d call back the next day.

He didn’t. I called the paper’s customer service folks twice and they said they didn’t have anything to do with outside telemarketers. The woman I talked to couldn’t understand what I meant when I pointed out that they were, in fact, being represented by this company and they should be concerned about the lack of followup. She merely repeated her assertion. She also wouldn’t give me the deal the telemarketer offered.

I hung up and called the paper and said I would like to speak to someone in circulation, and they connected me right back to the same woman in customer service. Frustrated, I looked up the circulation manager on the paper’s web site and dialed him directly. His assistant answered and most graciously apologized for all the hassles and took my information for my subscription.

Two hours later I received a phone call from some anonymous voice at the newspaper asking if I REALLY would like to start getting the paper (what? a new subscriber?). They asked how I intended to pay for it, and I had to explain that I had just given the director’s assistant all my info. They said they would check with her.

As soon as I hung up, the phone rang and it’s the telemarketing firm again, asking if I would like to subscribe to the paper. Were I a cartoon, steam would have started pouring from my ears. GADS! I won’t even go into the several phone calls needed to get my WSJ subscription started.

All in all, it took five days, 6 or 7 people and multiple phone calls just to get two papers plopped near my door. The next day I awoke a bit earlier than usual, eager to start the day with a cup of coffee and the newspaper.

No paper. Delivery guy was late. Again.