Posts filed under 'Newspapers'
Nosing around books on education I find this advice on being a head teacher.
It’s in a book by Tim Brighouse, How Successful Headteachers Survive and Thrive.
- Heads should greet children and teachers as they enter school.
- They should go on a daily walk, talking to kitchen staff and cleaners as well as teachers, and sometimes follow a pupil through a day’s lessons.
- They should be not scolds but skalds - a Scandinavian word for poets who inspire warriors before battle - recalling great deeds and anticipating further triumphs.
- They should say “we”, not “I”.
- And they should spend two hours a week doing “acts of unexpected kindness”, remembering birthdays and writing appreciative notes.
Not bad advice for editors too.
April 30th, 2008
Shakeup Media is officially “Highly Commended”.
At the 2008 Newspaper Awards, our Financial Times design didn’t quite win but it was “highly commended” (basically 2nd place). The paper itself, of course, was named Newspaper of the Year. For those of you keeping track at home, that is three for three at the big award ceremonies.
April 23rd, 2008
A couple of interesting blogs elsewhere on the launch of The National, Martin Newland’s new paper from Abu Dhabi.
Both comment on the difficulties of running a credible paper in the UAE where press freedom is firmly restricted.
Rob Corder at arabianbusiness.com makes the point that the current market leader, Gulf News, is not going to lose many readers until The National is able to practise bolder journalism - the sort that many UAE expats are accustomed to back home. Judging by the launch issue this is not going to be for a while.
Neil Cook, Editor of The Gulf Times in neighbouring Qatar, analyses a breaking story about a major corruption scandal at Deyaar Development, one of Dubai’s largest real estate companies, that could have made a splash for the launch issue of The National. As it turned out there was apparently no mention of it at launch, although it was followed up on subsequent days once the dust had settled. Cook writes:
“Editors in the Arab world are well versed at answering questions about press freedom and none can deny that there are varying levels of self-censorship, which one senior editorial executive in Singapore once termed, in all seriousness, ‘editorial judgement’”
It was wise of Martin not to run it. But, knowing him, it must have been very hard.
April 22nd, 2008
I wrote/designed a little piece for Good Magazine this month, its not on their website yet (I think they can’t figure out how to post the map) but here it is in case anyone is interested…(the map is based on those old school, ridiculously extravagant USA Today weather maps)…
Weather in east Africa is myth. Relatively limited access to mass media plus simple and predictable meteorological patterns have conspired to make climate inherent, social knowledge. December to February of each year is the dry season, so is June to August. These patterns have always been reliable, so much so that the burgeoning newspaper industries in Uganda and Kenya do not bother to print even the most cursory of weather maps. Until now.
Years riddled with misplaced climate disasters – including last year’s disastrous floods in the usually dry month of August which displaced thousands in Northern and Eastern Uganda – have convinced the Daily Monitor, the leading independent newspaper in Uganda, and The Nation, Kenya’s paper of record, to revisit the weather map question.
I know because they asked me to design the map.
It is a difficult proposition, drafting a weather map for a country that has never seen one. Not that it is a bad idea. Like much of Africa, Uganda is a fundamentally agrarian society; over 80% of the 30m population is involved in agriculture so the people here are more dependent on the vagaries of the heavens than most places in the world. But I can’t help but feel the hefty irony of making a map for a country that the UN’s International Panel on Climate Change recently included on a list of the 100 most vulnerable countries to climate change.
My bright yellow and relentlessly cheery “Sunny” icons seem to betray the depth of desperation in a third world country bearing the brunt of what Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni calls an “act of aggression” perpetrated by the rich world against the poor world. My lovingly detailed “Partly Cloudy” icons could just as easily portend the flooding of thousands of unstable homes and attendant displacement/famine/death as an afternoon shower. In acting out the mundane job of explaining the weather to a nation, I felt, and still feel, overwhelmed by the inadequacy of it all. I started to think about the perfect weather map of Africa, an utterly honest map that takes into account Africa’s unique but perilous position in the world. I think it looks a little something like this.
April 22nd, 2008
So Martin Newland’s new paper has come out today.
The National. Launched out of Abu Dhabi. A classy broadsheet launched, as Frank Kane explains in today’s Guardian, by “the richest emirate of the UAE, with some $900bn of oil cash sitting in the bank, to steal the thunder of its blingier neighbour, Dubai.” It comes in four sections: news, business, sport and life & arts.
The paper is designed by Lucy LaCava of Montreal who was a key figure behind Conrad Black’s Canadian paper The National Post on which Martin was Managing Editor, before he took over as Editor of The Telegraph.
It looks a bit like the Guardian before its most recent redesign. Very clean and confident. Sans headlines.
And it has some familiar LaCava touches - briefs at the top of the page for example (see below for some pages).
We’ll do a more detailed critique after it has been going for a while.
But for now we should simply celebrate. It is pretty good to get a new paper out these days.
Many congratulations to Martin and best wishes from us.
April 21st, 2008
How would you define the British newspaper tribes today?
Impossible probably. However surely all would agree: five years ago it would have been very different.
Peter Wilby had a go at some of it in Monday’s Guardian.
This is the way he put it:
- Guardian - public sector professions
- Times - the old establishment (just)
- Telegraph - the Tory heartlands
- Independent - “readers of refined sensibility, the sort who attend art-house cinemas, prefer Japanese cuisine, and abhor plastic bags”
He said the first three were tribal, the last not.
I’d say something like this:
- Guardian - public sector professions (tribe)
- Telegraph - fogeys young and old (tribe)
- Times -’the suits’ (non-tribe)
- Independent - greens (small tribe)
- FT - the ruling class (tribe)
- Mail - shoppers (non-tribe)
- Sun - lads both young and old (tribe)
The gap? A paper that’s cool. Everyone under 35 I know is trying to be cool. It’s a huge tribe without a paper.
April 17th, 2008
A meditation in the New Yorker a few days ago on the death of newspapers and the implications for democracy. It is by Eric Alterman and titled ‘Out Of Print’.
There are nine main points:
1/ After a lifespan of 300 years the American newspaper industry is suffused with a palpable sense of doom. The rise of the internet has made it look slow and unresponsive; the advent of Craigslist has wiped out classified advertising revenue. Newspaper stocks are collapsing e.g. NY Times company has declined 54% since the end of 2004.
2/ Public trust in newspaper has slipped in concert with the bottom line. Fewer than 20% of Americans believe “all or most” media reporting. More Americans believe in flying saucers than believe in the notion of balanced mainstream news.
3/ Most managers have reacted with a spiral of budget cuts: bureau closings, buyouts, layoffs and reductions in page size. As one columnist, Molly Ivins, complained: the newspapers’ solution has been to make “our product smaller and less helpful and less interesting”. Philip Meyer in The Vanishing Newspaper predicts the final copy of the final newspaper will be printed in 2043.
4/ The idea of news itself has changed from editors telling us what we should know, to getting a point of view about not just what happened but why it happened and being able to talk about and debate this with people who think about the world in similar ways.
5/ If Arthur Miller is right and a good newspaper is “a nation talking to itself” then the Huffington Post is a great newspaper. In two years it has acquired 11m unique visitors per month which is more than all but eight newspaper sites. And it is growing!
6/ Huffington Post has very light editorial interference - they operate the “mullet strategy” (business up front, party in the back). So the home page is controlled while the inside pages are full of the musings of an army of both celebrity and non-celebrity bloggers.
7/The tension between the mainstream media and the web was presaged by the early 20th century debate between Walter Lippmann and John Dewey. Lippmann likened the average American to a deaf spectator in the back row at a sporting event. “He does not know what is happening, why it is happening, what ought to happen”. Effectively his suggestion was to junk democracy and see journalism as a function of the intellectual ruling elite. Dewey saw democracy like a focus group; people needed to discuss and deliberate ideas. “The man who wears the shoe knows best that it pinches and where it pinches”.
8/ The Lippmann model, in which politics became a business for professionals and a spectator sport for the great unwashed, remained unchallenged until the Reagan revolution when the conservative counter-establishment attempted to seize the reins of democratic authority from the liberal media elite. The liberal version of this is now evident in the anti-Bush blogosphere. Joshua Micah Marshall’s Talking Points Memo relies on an army of collaborators who give him a huge amount of valuable information that is not always available to mainstream reporters.
9/ But what happens to democracy when we can no longer depend upon newspapers to invest their unmatched resources in helping people to learn what we need to know? Print and online models will converge: Huffington will hire more staff and the NY Times will do more distributed journalism, more wisdom-of-the-crowd reporting. We are about to enter a chaotic world of news characterised by superior community conversation but diminished first-rate journalism. We will lose the single national narrative and agreed “set of facts” by which to conduct our politics. And what happens to democracy then?
April 15th, 2008
There was much free advice for Roger Alton around the media pages this weekend. Some of it was in his old paper The Observer yesterday, some in The Guardian today. I trust he will sensibly ignore it all and get on with the job. But it is irresistible to add to it - especially since, unlike Mr A, we don’t have to risk our necks by actually doing it.
Contrary to those who think The Independent should go free, we think it should get more expensive. (And this is despite our general excitement about the free papers). With full colour presses coming on-stream in September, why not lead the way yet again and declare the newspaper dead and buried. And no, don’t transfer the whole thing to the web and go 100% digital. Launch a daily magazine instead.
At least, this is how we would market it. The reality is not that shocking and surely would not dangerously ruffle the daily 134,000 full-price loyalists that the Independent currently commands. The paper is already half magazine. The famous ‘viewspaper’ covers are straight from the magazine world. The consumery parts (50 best etc) and the promotions (mini-books) would sit comfortably in many a magazine package.
However there is a lot more that could be done. You could first of all drop the idea of covering news at all, at least in the conventional way. Instead you could transfer 85% of the staff to features duties and retain 15% to provide an excellent and intelligent news aggregation service that would be printed, say, in a single column on page one and then, perhaps, in a 16 page outer section with 8 pages of international and national briefings at the front and 8 pages of business and sport at the back. There would be no pretensions to original reporting. These briefings would simply recount what was happening, factually and succinctly. They could be laid out in a completely new way - perhaps using mapping to locate the events described. Each briefing would have a simple URL that would take you, via the website, to the best longer version of that story that the Indy could find that night - anywhere in the world in any medium.
The main page one story would be your best feature. It might be news but often it would not. It might be an interview, an essay, a piece of reportage. Of course, it would always aim to be utterly compulsive reading and it would have to be, on some deeper level, of the moment. It should always be surprising.
The heart of the paper would then become a fully fledged magazine. This would take a long time to think through. It would have to be a mixture of general, business, sport and consumer topics tailored expertly for the progressive, aesthetically-driven mindset of the core Independent reader. Magazine design standards should apply i.e. 30% better and more careful than your average newspaper page. Photography could return to the heart and centre of the Indy’s being. In fact, at the weekend (for which we have another plan to be blogged about later) we’d relaunch a Picture Post style photo magazine. And the general editing levels would have to be the best in the business.
The whole package - news summary plus features - could be considerably shorter than any current daily paper and also than the current incarnation, thereby saving paper and possibly, depending on the new presses, allowing it to be stitched.
As for the website, apart from becoming the central exchange for directing readers to news sources, make it a TV station. All those new feature writers, not to mention educated readers, will have so much to say, so many background stories to tell and will so quickly learn to take a camera with them everywhere that you can see the Indy becoming a upmarket mini-You Tube in just a couple of years.
Executed well –and few would do it better than Roger — this would go a long way to achieving the following:
- Reinvigorate a paper that, being fourth out of four in its sector, needs to keep its adrenaline high
- Make it yet more distinctive and different from its peers
- Anticipate the drift of all papers (predicted by Harry Evans 40 years ago) as news loses its value
- Use print and colour to full advantage with more emphasis on pictures and design
- Save paper
- Make the Indy a great place to work
- Give the website a proper role and purpose
April 14th, 2008
I like the way The Times is becoming more serious.
The lead story today, for example, is the economy, no lightweight subject. The treatment is thorough with a good spread on pp 8 and 9. And the whole thing is extremely skillfully handled to make it as broad and accessible as possible. The packaging is good: case histories, Q&A, analysis. And therefore as night follows day the design is good too.
The single blurb on page one is thrillingly and daringly dull: an interview with Khaled Hosseini flagged with the words ‘The Book Seller’. Whoever wrote it should not shrink from doing something similar again. It is simple and understated, saying almost nothing about the piece inside except that there is an interview with a man who sells a lot of books. And the interview is good and interesting.
I like the idea of putting the briefs along the bottom and opening up the main page area. There is really no need to have a column of briefs down the side except that it adds an important vertical element to an otherwise cake-layered front page.
My only front page design reservation is the placing of the blurb above the masthead. I have always found it the hardest choice; far worse than which end of a boiled egg to crack open and far more worth going to war over. At various papers in very different circumstances I have tried above and below. In the end, after much deliberation, I have decided that blurb below is best.
The main reason, I always believed, for having the blurb above is that it somehow separated the bingo and the free packet of seeds from the beginning of the real paper. That was marked by the masthead, below which one gave readers a sense of real priorities.
In a previous incarnation I put the FT blurb above the masthead for similar reasons. Even though there was never any bingo in the FT, I still thought that a funny piece by Lucy Kellaway should be the other side of the title from the serious news coverage.
Now I think that was wrong and I am glad that Ryan and the new FT regime have moved the blurbs back below. First, no ordinary reader gets the message that above the masthead means somehow ‘not at the heart of what we are about’. So it is a semiotic redundancy. Second, where the paper is stacked in upright racks with other titles slightly below and in front, all you could see was Lucy Kellaway and not Financial Times.
Moreover, today I believe newspapers have to try as hard as possible to present themselves as a rich and varied mixtures. It is not news that sells newspapers. It is the quality of the mixture around the news: everything from the comment to the cut price plane tickets. The information and entertainment package that is The Times includes a whole lot more than news and by putting the masthead right at the top and then mixing the other elements of the front page below, you support that message.
Having the blurb at the top does slightly lessen the impact of the title and hint that I might buy the paper more for an interview with Khaled Hosseini than for the fact that it is The Times. For 90% of readers the opposite is likely to be the case. And anyway, a good interview with Khaled ‘the book seller’ has no diminishing effect upon the new, more serious, positioning of the paper.
April 11th, 2008
I went to Kampala last Wednesday to see through the Monitor launch…looking at it again today after a long (and much delayed, as usual) flight I still think it looks remarkably good. Much more on this later but suffice to say its success is a credit to a hard working and dedicated staff. Congratulations to all….below see selected pages from the first three editions (click on the pages to see full-sized versions)….
Launch Edition (Friday April 4th)
Saturday Edition (April 5th)
Sunday Edition (April 6th)
April 7th, 2008
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