Projects completed this spring and summer include:
Al Watan Relaunch
Saudi Arabia’s first national daily newspaper, Al Watan, was launched seven years ago by Khalid Al Faisal, Governor of the Mecca province and a leading member of the reformist wing of the Saudi royal family.Controversial and innovative, It made a huge splash at the time.A contemporary relaunch was commissioned in order to recapture some of the excitement and success of those early years.The guidance was to make the newspaper sharp and modern, somewhat like the Guardian. The senior team wanted the whole works: better use of colour, a new masthead, new customised fonts, better architecture, a reinvented front page, better use of graphics, better display for advertising and high impact on the sales racks. The fact that the paper is published in Arabic posed an extra challenge.Ryan’s design work was very favourably received and has been credited with returning Al Watan to the forefront of Saudi papers.The editor of a competitor newspaper, Okaz, wrote: “You took the Saudi press 10 years forward. I cannot do what you have done. It is a turning point in the history of the Arab press”.
Keighley News Redesign
Our redesign of the 147-year old Keighley News was unveiled to a (doubtless, sceptical) West Yorkshire readership.Editor Malcolm Hoddy and Newsquest group editor Perry Austin-Clarke, had asked for a thorough modernisation of the weekly tabloid – but one that didn’t scare off loyal readers. The end result was, in the words of Mr Austin-Clarke “ a fresher, brighter, better-organised product” ; and the latest circulation figures show a sales lift of between 3% and 3.5%.
Gulf Times Redesign
A year’s work, on and off, on Qatar’s top selling English language newspaper, the Gulf Times, came to fruition.Launch week passed in a flurry of meetings with sub-editors around their desks and late night Indian take-aways in Doha. The changes we made were huge – by any standards – and involved the whole structure and shape of the paper as well as fonts, grids and layouts.Neil Cook, the managing editor, said: “Shakeup Media did a first rate job both in design and also in working with us on implementation. Their long newspaper experience meant that the design not only looked great, it really worked in practice and helped editors improve the organisation and projection of news, comment and features. The paper overall is much improved and readers have reacted very positively”.
The Venice Report
Several months work, on and off, on a major report from Venice in Peril, the charity that finances research into the problems of Venice, saw the light of day. Chairman, Anna Somers Cocks wanted us to turn a collection of scholarly essays into a publication that looked beautiful and presented all the technical information in a series of lucid and precise graphics. Once we had selected the typefaces and decided on the best presentation of the text and display copy, we worked with some fine photographers and a mass of detailed statistical material to come up with a handsome book-length report that communicates nearly as much visually as it does in the words.
Current projects
Current occupations include two big websites — one in the education sector and one in publishing –and two magazines — one launch and one relaunch (one is a new weekly news magazine coming out next spring and the other is the redesign of a respected international title).
Other News
·We moved offices – the new address is Shakeup Media, 5th Floor, Haymarket House, 1 Oxendon Street, London SW1Y 4EE – equidistant between Piccadilly Circus and Leicester Square tubes
·Since January, Richard has been editor in chief and director of content for an educational web platform called imJack (imJack.com) which provides secure social networking to schools and is planning to launch a variety of material including current affairs next year. The focus is on the UK but there’s no reason why it shouldn’t develop into an international business.
·The book that Richard spent the winter working on with Stephen Green, chairman of HSBC, was published by Allen Lane in July and was subsequently long-listed by the FT for Business Book of the Year. Good Value: Reflections on Money, Morality and an Uncertain World is, of course, available from Amazon.
If we can help you with design, writing, editing or media advice please contact us through our website www.shakeupmedia.com
I am now officially fluent in newspaper Arabic. I can speak about columns, fonts, positioning, stories and bylines. I know the word for ghost (because photo cut-outs shouldn’t float like them), and for gigantic (because headlines always needed to be bigger). I even have a handle on the various hand gestures Arabic folk tend to pepper their conversation with. Its an eccentric vocabulary to be sure but its also the definition of useful. Drop me into any Arabic newsroom in the world and I would be totally fine. Just don’t ask me to order food or talk to a real person.
I learned my sprinkling of the language in the newsroom of Al Watan, the liberal-leaning national newspaper in Saudi Arabia and our first Arab language client. Al Watan is 10 years old. When it launched in Saudi, it changed the face of newspapers. In the past 10 years, the other newspapers in the country haven’t so much evolved as copied the innovations of Al Watan. The idea behind the current project was to push the Al Watan 10 years ahead of the pack. Again.The overall project was split into two parts. The first was technical and skills oriented. Our friends at Human Capital (especially Tim Ewington and Zadok Prescott) and I spent more than two weeks helping with the transition from Quark to Indesign CS4 ME and training a large and relatively inexperienced design staff in both the new program and the basic design principles that underpin the basis of the new look (including the use of photography, color, structure, etc). The second was about finally introducing that new look, nurtured for months and put through severe editorial scrutiny, focus groups and print tests, to the world.
It was a daunting learning curve, not only designing from right to left but basically relearning typography from scratch and coming to terms with not being able to speak or read the language. This final limitation was probably the hardest for us, we Shakeup Medians pride ourselves on our literacy and special relationship with words. After all, we are, all of us, readers and writers first (and by training) and designers second.
Still Ellen and I spent weeks learning about the vagaries of Arabic typography (with lots of help, thank you Nadine and many many others) and, after all that, decided we wanted nothing more than make our own. So we did. Or, more precisely, the wonderful and wonderfully talented Pascal Zhogobi, one of the most exciting young Arabic typographers working today, did, with only the slightest of direction from us. The new font, Al Watan Headline is the core of the new design.
Like many of Pascal’s fonts, Al Watan Headline is inspired by old Arabic hot metal type workshops found in Lebanon and across the Arabic world. Pascal’s genius is an ability to combine traditional forms with a modern and young flair. Its like a hot pink bowler; classy and traditional but unmistakably modern. We used the Linotype classic Yakout for body type and TheSansArab by Lucas Fonts for various secondary labelling.
We instituted a number of modern newspaper techniques, including a three layer headline system; colorful photo-based pull quotes; prominent sidebar and background boxes; color coded sections; a series of L-shaped front pages that allow loads of display space without interfering with the sanctity of the news area; larger, more dynamic, better cropped photographs; more vertical pages; spreads that don’t interfere with each other; better infographics; and many many other things….
The biggest change, though, was the conversion of Al Watan from a paper that strived to be comprehensive above all else to an edited newspaper that strives to tell readers what is important and why. Of course much of the credit for this is should go to the editorial staff at Al Watan, particularly the Editor Jamal Khashoggi and his deputies plus the talented former BBC and Al Hayat journalist the paper brought in to help with the editorial side of the relaunch, Youssef Khazem.
The new paper is split in to two bodies. News, Opinion and Sport in the first body with Business, Life and Culture in the second. See below for photos from the relaunch and some sample pages.
Most newspapers follow a fairly predictable trajectory in the days and weeks following a relaunch. The inevitable minor flaws of the first day’s paper are ironed out under intense collaboration between newspaper staff and the relaunch team. For a few days the resulting paper steers a course close to the designers’ vision. When the design team goes home, however, and the initial enthusiasm for the new approach wanes in the face of the day-to-day scrum of putting together a paper, old habits often creep back. Corners begin to be cut, new procedures fall by the wayside and a steady decline in quality begins.
Which is why the newspapers coming out of the Gulf Times offices two weeks later are so impressive. The staff are still putting together a paper that is vastly more accessible and appealing than in its previous incarnation, due to the following factors:
1. Pages that are better organised due to a clear hierarchy of stories and a strong focus to each page.
2. More effective use of pictures to provide visual contrast and interest.
3. Use of page furniture – drop quotes, break-out boxes, graphics – to create story packages that strengthen the hierarchy and provide multiple entry-points to a page.
4. Clear section and story labelling that aid in navigation, through the paper and around the page.
There’s nothing like relaunching a newspaper. Some hate it. I love it — the moment when the whole sand castle is threatening to dissolve in a heap before the oncoming waves of chaos with about one hour to go to deadline is my favourite — and remember vividly each newspaper relaunch that I’ve been involved in (now, quite a few).
Whereever the country, whatever the language, and however different the scale, newspaper relaunches have many common features. There is always the shock when the new look is presented to the staff, the barrage of questions about details, the dreary trudge of training, the (misguided) optimism on the day when the early pages turn out to be easier than expected, the frenzy around ninety minutes before final press time when the largest number of pages are being cleared at once and the exhausted, glazed faces round the monitor when the final pages limp past the finishing line.
There is always the rush of relief when the presses start and everyone realises that there will be paper on sale the next day, just like every other day for past ten, twenty, hundred years. There is always the instinct to party and journalists will usually find a way.
And there is always the thrill of seeing the first copies after a couple of hours of sleep, always glistening and new, if never quite as perfect as hoped.
There is a new look Gulf Times today. The story in today’s paper is here and I’ll add some pictures when back in the UK. We at Shakeup have been working on it on and off for over a year, so it is an exciting culmination of much thought and planning. The relaunch was no exception to the process above: we went through every stage last night.
The result today? Pretty good by any comparison. The main thing is that the paper overall looks absolutely transformed - a dramatic change of key. It has pulled off the extremely difficult balancing act of looking dazzlingly new and confidently settled at the same time. (Credit to our very own design genius Ryan). The myriad of small errors do not detract badly from the overall effect They will be fixed in the next three days.
The Gulf Times is Qatar’s biggest English language daily, seven days a week. Neil Cook, the editor, has sure-footedly driven the entire process. A British import — he is ex-FT, very experienced — he knows what he is doing. His editing team picked up InDesign in a couple of days and only had a very few days to learn the new styles. In such circumstances they have all done amazingly well.
Sitting in Tallinn last week with an excellent bunch of art directors and a large pile of papers (all in Estonian), design principles became more abstract. Not understanding the stories served to highlight the visual principles at work. And it reminded everyone just how universal really are the rules of making a good newspaper.
So, with thanks to my fellow judges, here is what emerged from my notes: the seven secrets of news design.
Layout — including strong story hierarchy, building the page from the centre outwards, building in proper contrast and vibrancy to the page, thinking in spreads, sticking to a grid and using space to led the whole thing breathe
Pictures — including the use of horizontal and vertical contrast, variety of depth, bold cropping and occasional use of a mild tilt to add interest to an otherwise worthy image.
Type — including the adherence to a strict hierarchy of weights/sizes and a deliberate contrast between short, shy labels and longer, fuller headlines
Colour — including restraint in use of half-tones and tints and careful preparation of a systematic and logical palette
Navigation — including a system of colour coding, labelling and cross-referencing and a strong method of building and differentiating story packages on news pages
Packages — including a simple set of furniture for building story packages: subsidiary stories, sidebars, pull-quotes, graphics and photos
Graphics — including a clear distinction between info-graphics (graphs and charts) and illustration (photo-montages and drawing) but with a recognition that both skills are essential to great newspaper design
If these areas were properly managed, we all agreed, the proof of the pudding would be in the reading. The result would be a newspaper that was absolutely user-friendly, consistent and (most important of all) interesting.
In the gloom before the storm it is tempting to be nothing but depressed. There are many reasons to be sad or sorry. Each friend who receives a call for an appointment with the HR director is another reason. But there are also reasons to be cheerful. Here are five mutually reinforcing points, unscientifically presented.
One
Why we should be cheerful: There’s a growing public demand for serious journalism.
What’s happening: There are signs, real signs, that people are getting more demandingly curious about the world. More people want to understand; fewer people want to be titillated. We need meaning, not just information. This might be because when things go wrong, you look for wisdom. But it might also be a reaction against the past 20 years during which we fell in love with the technologies that undid our capacities to think. In the West we became a trivial culture, preoccupied with the feelies, the orgy porgy and the centrifugal bumble-puppy. Many people became addicted to being constantly amused; and if they were not, they sulked.
Evidence? Intellectually, not only the uncanny truth of some of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World but also some of Neil Postman’s 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death. The essay Overload in the November 2008 issue of the Columbia Review of Journalism. Empirically, the success of The Economist, The Week, The Spectator and Alain de Botton’s School of Life. Also, the galloping sales of non-fiction books that in some way or other “explain the world”.
.
Two
Why we should be cheerful: In the next three years media owners will start to support “good” journalism. They’ll have to.
What’s happening: Media owners are at different stages but they are all going to have to take the following four steps 1) Stare mortality in the face. This is happening everywhere from Wasilla to Lugansk and from Porsanger to Brownsville. 2) Realise the future’s with the web - whatever platform you use now 3) Work out that the only journalism that will flourish on the web will be networked 4) Discover that networked journalism has to be better journalism because a post-modern, post-industrial, multi-faith, neoEnlightenment world demands it. Journalism that remains even a little bit out of touch, cumbersome, prejudiced or inaccurate won’t survive and a business that can’t take these four steps is heading for the turn-off to Valhalla.
Evidence? Intellectually, Charlie Beckett’s book SuperMedia which is the text for networked journalism. The more you peruse it, the more it emerges as a very good book indeed. Empirically, which would you put your money on: Huffington Post or the LA Times?
Three
Why we should be cheerful: It’s an open field. Anyone can be the next Joseph Pulitzer.
What’s happening: In the next few years being a big media company is going to be beyond grim. Costs are going up. The most important source of revenue, advertising, is going down - probably by 25%. The only way to survive is cuts. Shrinking not only hurts, it disfigures. Shrunk businesses are tomorrow’s dead businesses. Meanwhile: the media business models that work are a) cheap to start and b) baffling to mainstream media. If you have been working in TV or newspapers for 20 years and got to the top, you have not had time to pay attention to the new media ecology. It is a great time to be young, to be daring, to be unafraid of failure.
Evidence: A site such as Glam - already huge and based on (relatively) little funding.
Four
Why we should be cheerful: Attractive populism is a real possibility
What’s happening: Populism is good for journalism. It connects journalism to large audiences. It is good for society; it keeps powerful people honest. It balances the pervasive curse of elitism. What interests the public is, in the end, in the public interest. We must learn to love our Daily Mails. But, historically, populism has been so damned ugly, mean, spiteful and nasty. Now, however, there’s a sign that a new populism might catch fire in the West that’s highly attractive: the populism of hope, of reason, of tolerance and of confidence in human ingenuity. Behind this lies a massive cultural shift to a post-materialist sensibility in which values replace stuff and happiness is only tenuously linked to wealth. Did anyone else notice Michael Wolff of Vanity Fair writing this month: “The media business is about the glory of stuff-stuff to buy, stuff to envy, stuff to dream about. But for the first time in modern media memory, stuff is now the enemy. The consumer is in retreat from consumerism.”? What a manifesto for a new Beaverbrook.
Evidence: Barack Obama
Five
Why we should be cheerful: Print has a great future.
What’s happening: It’s just a matter of getting it right. This doesn’t contradict the four steps mentioned above. When I say the future’s with the web and journalism will be networked, I don’t preclude that journalism being published in print. The best newspapers of the next 10 years will create powerful online networks and use them to help create the words and pictures that they put into print. Print is not just a technology to be replaced by a newer one. Print is a genre with a soul of its own. But to survive, it must change. There’s no future for 126 page papers filled with a mix of heavy, light, UK, foreign, business, arts and sporting news. Papers will have to focus ruthlessly on what they do best and leave the rest to others. What they do best is to edit. (Some use the word “curate”). It boils down to this: taking a huge heap of confusing stories and reducing them to a package with meaning. Distilling, synthesising, explaining, designing - that is what papers must focus on. They will have to do it with fewer pages and far smaller staffs. But when they do it right they will usher in another golden age of print. Of course printing machinery may evolve to the point where we have digital paper or e-paper. In my view that still counts as print.
Evidence: “Unlike the doom-and-gloomers, I believe that newspapers will reach new heights,” - Rupert Murdoch last week.
We were in Amsterdam last week (thus, lazily, no column) at the main annual gathering of IFRA, an acronym that according to the organisers “no longer means anything”.
It used to be the event for newspaper publishers to meet and talk about printing. It is now trying to turn itself, with only partial success, into the event for publishers to meet and talk about everything from software to websites (as well as print).
So it was a good place to take the temperature of the patient that is the newspaper industry and to talk to the people that run it. Here were the commercial bosses from newspaper companies in all the major economies of the world.
I had some meetings arranged in advance with outstanding people that I respect and admire. However out on the floor of the conference what a dismal experience it was. If it had been a parade ground these were emphatically not the Marines. Dad’s Army perhaps.
With the benefit of a few days’ reflection I would put it more temperately. There were, as I say, some very interesting and vital voices there. But to convey the raw emotion that I felt on Day Two of IFRA, I find my notebook contains the following:
“What a gathering of jobbernowls! Seldom have I tuned into a more lifeless, jargon-filled, half-baked, self-pitying, poorly-digested, left-over rice pudding of thoughts about the state of journalism. If we want to know why our business is in such a state we must surely start with this: the management is not up to scratch”.
I have a friend who is on the board of a top international business school. “Journalism attracts some top young intellects,” she says. “It is still seen as a really exciting and respected role. Publishing is not. People who get jobs in publishing are people who were not smart enough for retailing, advertising or insurance.” I don’t agree with her but, apparently, plenty of her peers do.
It seemed that nearly all of the 10,000 people there were in a deep funk about print. The recession, falling currencies, newsprint prices, advertising downturns, free papers, aging readers and the incursions of the web were all cited as reasons. Hall 10 (I think it was) where the big print companies had their stalls was either referred to as the Dinosaur Park or the Natural History Museum.
I was shocked by the pessimism. Maybe Roy Greenslade is right. His arguments about the inevitable death of print are always lucid and powerfully put and his is a voice to be taken extremely seriously. In an excellent blog today about the BBC and the regions he rams it home:
“Old media - whether it be newspapers, magazines or straightforward radio and TV broadcasting - has accepted that it must move on to a new platform, the internet, if it is to survive.”
I have spent two years, so far, struggling to start a newspaper in the UK so I am under no illusions about how tough it is. I have not one trace of rose-tinting left on my old and battered spectacles.
However I have always believed that printed newspapers have lives still to live. I have always believed that there are new types of newspapers we haven’t imagined yet that will excite readers all over again.
Let me try and clarify the two contrasting views here. First there is the view that newspapers are a format. An oft-used metaphor is from the music industry. Anyone over 50 has seen the market move from vinyl to digital (and everything in between) in rapid order. As a society we still love music. We simply store it and play it in a different way. According to this view, newspapers are the vinyl of news. News will continue but papers won’t.
The second view is that newspapers are a genre. This view holds that there is something about newspapers that makes them a category of their own, with a distinctive form, content and technique that can’t be replaced - such as theatre or oil painting. These genres have not been replaced by possible substitutes such as film or photography. On the contrary they have been inspired by them to new directions. According to this view the internet will not replace newspapers but will enable a reinvention to take place inside newspapers, creating myriad new opportunities for journalism and for entrepreneurs.
Anyone who loves newspapers and has seen them function well will know what I mean when I talk about the sum of print, paper, type, words, pictures, history, opinion and character adding up to more than the parts. This is what makes a genre. By contrast there was nothing about a cassette tape of Leonard Cohen that made the listening experience any different to a CD of Leonard Cohen.
There are plenty of newspaper master classes to be had currently in Britain. (How to run a campaign - Daily Mail. How to design a page - Guardian). I would posit that there are hardly any to be had in the USA which might help explain why the industry is doing so badly there. It’s interesting that web evangelists such as Jeff Jarvis are becoming increasingly excited by the idea of editors - or “content DJs” as he suggested we might call them earlier this week.
In the aftermath of the financial collapse, people are looking for simple realities and hard truths. Real journalism, analysis, reportage and explanation can live better on the printed page than on the screen. Advertisers that want to share that authenticity also seem to prefer print. No stand-alone website has yet found a way to fund journalism.
All this requires more thought, I know.
But perhaps, if newspaper managements were as innovative and exciting as, say, Google’s - we wouldn’t be quite so glum.
If we take ‘our age’ as being the past 30 years, its defining debates have been around the following subjects (results in brackets): capitalism v communism (knock-out victory to capitalism); East v West (East coming up strongly); rationalism v fundamentalism (rationalism winning not without fierce resistance); free markets v controlled economies (we thought free markets had triumphed eh??) and consumerism v slow/green/small/simple movements (more later).
When the histories get written by our great grandchildren I think it will be last debate that is seen to be the most significant. This is the underlying ebb and flow which really governs our lives. Our age is the one in which pockets of people first took to heart the conservationist gospel against which all else pales and whose long term effects supersede all others. In addition, and in my view even more powerfully, our age is the one in which nearly everyone experimented with the idea that sex and shopping could make you happy and found it severely wanting.
This is the philosophical reason why the current story of the markets is so exciting and important. It is much more than a story of human hardship, greedy bankers and panicked politicians although that in itself is a drama that commands attention. It is a story of the turning point in the most important debate of the past thirty years. In future our descendants may look back and say: “October 2008 is when the slow movement won”.
Our age is when the view that life’s main aim was consumption and the purchase of material possessions reached its widest acceptance. It was energetically encouraged by the champions of laissez-faire economics, continual growth and free markets. Against it, has been a growing coalition, united in opposition even though sharply divided on many key matters. This coalition includes conservationists, anti-capitalists, socialists and religious groups.
Even before October, any attentive observer of British life would have noted a steady efflorescence of this anti-consumerist front. But it was this month’s ungainly collapse of the free market economies of the West that really became the tipping point in the argument and the moment when the anti-consumerists gained the upper hand.
Where does anti-consumerism take us? The Future Foundation says we should expect more “smart boredom”. We should expect more log fires (boom time for chimney sweeps apparently); more cycles; more cooking at home; more scrapbooks; more knitting; more board games. Above all we should expect to see a hardening of consumer taste in favour of the sustainable, the rough-and-ready and the real. The highest mark of value? No longer Paris, London and New York but home-made.
Most fascinating of all to some of us is - what does this mean for journalism? Who is it bad for and who is it good for?
The bad news is that it is likely to be bad for the mainstream which currently gives most journalists their livelihood. Most of our mainstream media from ITV on one side to the Daily Mail on the other is both fascinated by consumerism and heavily dependent on it. Keeping up with the Joneses drives much of its content. And advertising, the lifeblood of consumerism, drives much of its revenue.
The pressure on this model is hardly new. Decline has been endemic for several years. But a widespread step change in sentiment such as the one that will follow on from the banking collapse of October 2008 will make this pressure immeasurably worse.
What sort of journalism will it be good for? Slow journalism, honest journalism, sincere journalism. One of the most thoughtful newspapermen I know predicts the rise of something like the Campaign For Real Journalism. By this I believe he means a pressure group that will fight for the right of journalists to spend enough time on a story to get somewhere near the truth of the matter, to do investigative work, to go off the beaten track and to polish the end result.
There has been a lot of interest in the US in a new website called ProPublica. This is an independent, non-profit newsroom that produces investigative journalism in the public interest - supported by donations from several American foundations. British charity law is very different and I doubt the same site could flourish here but the need for it is parallel.
I also think the new zeitgeist will be good for home made journalism, for the individual with something to say and for the small group with a clearly defined purpose - as far as possible removed from the corporate structures and junk superficiality of the mass markets. It is precisely this trend that is giving such energy to journalism on the web. Of course it’s a truism now but no less worth remembering for that: anyone with a Word Press blog can now do their home made journalism and have access to a potential audience of trillions.
This week we at Shakeup tried to apply this thought to print. We tried to produce a prototype newspaper that was as “home made” as possible, without recourse to expensive presses or complex technologies. The result was The Manual, entirely hand-written and hand-drawn, distributed at certain tube stations on Monday morning, complete with ink splodges and errant lines where a hand had wobbled. (See the blog below for more).
We carried no advertising, used 100% recycled paper and printed on simple silk screen presses in a old workshop in Dalston. We consciously tried to convey something of the smell and feel of the materials that the newspaper was made of since we wanted people to keep it as an object of beauty rather than to discard it as junk.
We didn’t print that many copies but if we had printed 5,000 and had paid everyone involved at normal commercial rates we would have had to charge £3.50 an issue to break even.
I guess that means it isn’t a business. However, maybe that’s the unreconstructed mass market newspaperman in me. After all, £3.50 for a work of art that also happens to inform you about the world - that wouldn’t be a bad price.
This is most of the team (above) working last night on producing the first hand-made newspaper in the UK. Every word and every image and every mark of any kind in The Manual was drawn by a team of volunteers - mostly illustrators. The printing was also by hand, silk screened at The Print Club in Dalston. Each copy of the paper has been numbered in a limited edition of around 100.
This one-off non-profit project was organised by Shakeup Media to make a point about the future of print. We hope to show that handmade qualities can transform newspapers from ‘junk’ to collectable. We also want to demonstrate the power of print as a medium by using ink and paper in a manner that emphasises their unique touch, smell and texture.
(We are using 100% recycled 170gsm B2 size sheets folded in half and Neptune water-based ink with 10% retarder).
The journalism in The Manual is a work in progress but we are aiming for a style that is more explanatory than simply factual - the motto of the paper is “Today Explained”. And of course, being only four pages long, the paper must be extremely selective about the events that it covers.
What do we want to achieve? In our wildest dreams we would find a sponsor that wanted to produce a paper like this regularly. Otherwise we are happy simply to have done it once and worked with so many talented and generous illustrators and printers.
The photographs here are all copyright of the award-winning Caroline Irby (www.carolineirby.com)
The Cast
Richard Addis
Ryan Bowman
Jackie Shorey
Beatrice Addis
Chrissie Abbott - illustrator (website)
Susie Q and the Owls - illustrator (website) Fran - illustrator
Paco Garcia - illustrator (website)
John Sunyer - writer
Patrick Savile - printer (website) Nicolai Sciater - printer (website)
Emily Evans - printer/calligrapher
Victoria Torrance - printer/calligrapher
Rachel Solnick - calligrapher (website)
Becca Davies - calligrapher
William Williamson - film
Caroline Irby - photographer (website) Tom Barette
Fred - printer/Print Club owner (website) Kate - printer/Print Club owner (website)
Apple’s new music recommendation tool, the Genius button is….genius. It’s not a new idea by any means - see Pandora, last.fm or even Amazon - but its so seamless, so easy and simple (in fact, you don’t have to DO anything) that it is already more useful and more widespread than any of the original pioneers.
Note: Of course, like any collaborative tool, Genius will get more genius as it learns more about users but its worth noting that even now it works pretty darn well….usually, at least…I just genius-ed a maudlin but amazing Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy song and bizarrely got lots of fast-paced happy music from the the Pixies, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and (huh!?) Bloc Party.
We at Shakeup always harp on about the value of personalization and recommendation to news sites but, the truth is, I still don’t see it done on any of the mainstream newspaper sites, at least not on any large scale.
News organizations clearly understand that their greatest asset is the huge and ever-expanding store of stories, photos, videos, etc that they control. They are already starting, thanks to many an Internet evangelist, to look at this pile of information as a database that can be manipulated (for instance the now ubiquitous Most Popular/Most Commented/Most E-mailed lists). But they haven’t quite taken the next step - matching this undifferentiated database with very individual readers. That is, taking what they know about readers and their habits to suggest specific personalized stories, photos, etc, for them.
Again, not a new idea. But the secret is to make it all seamless. To make sure, like in iTunes, that users don’t have to actually do anything for this service. They just have to interact with the site and, before they know it, they have the nice little surprise.
Another note: On the difference between recommendation and personalization - Personalization is what a user chooses to see, how a user chooses to cut the information available to him (ie. asking to see the weather on the frontpage, or a specific stock). Recommendation is what a smart computer predicts a user will like (ie. a list of stories that match the reader’s history). In combination with an editor’s intelligence, they are very powerful information systems that provide: a) things I don’t know about but are important (what an editor chooses) b) things I don’t know about but will probably be interesting to me (recommendation) and c) things I am already interested in but want to learn more about (personalization).
Apple’s new music recommendation tool, the Genius button is….genius. It’s not a new idea by any means - see