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
Two zesty pieces of writing about media this week from America - both buzzing with flashy, larky intelligence that makes English journalism feel too much like mashed potato.First an elegant contribution to the “print is dead” discussion in the New York Times Magazine. It is by Virginia Heffernan, 39-year-old former “young-editor-to-watch” (Columbia Journalism Review), fact-checker at the New Yorker, editor at Slate, Harper’s,Talk and now, I think, online video critic for the New York TimesMagazine.
Second a sizzling attack on the “feckless zombies” who run Big Media, posted on The Daily Beast by its editor and founder Tina Brown, former editor of Talk, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair and Tatler.
What Ms Heffernan says is that traditional media types are great at self-delusion. First they pretend that content is king and that others will take care of the delivery. When that doesn’t work they pretend that traditional (”classic”) forms will survive thanks to digital extensions (i.e. the video game will support the Bond movie). When that doesn’t work (why not just have the video game and not the movie?) they overwhelmingly fail to realise that the stuff everyone is reading on Twitter and so forth is radically different from the stuff they are producing for Random House or Vogue or CNN. She says the DNA of the way a magazine feature is written is deeply and irreversibly connected to the fact that it is for a magazine. It is nothing like the way you would write a piece for The Huffington Post. So traditional media people must either a) focus on what they do best and defend their dwindling audiences and die or b) loosen up! and develop some mental flexibility in order to make the best of the brave new world.
What Ms Brown says is that we are back in eighteenth century London where the old patrons of the arts were withdrawing from the scene and the middle classes had not yet started buying books and newspapers and buying theatre tickets in sufficient quantities to provide a living for those being dumped by their patrons. She’s happy enough because of course those middle classes came good. Very good. And she sees the same happening on the web sometime soon. Meanwhile her vitriol is directed at the drones who oversee and torment the people in media companies (like some that I encountered at IFRA I suppose). “There are floors of these creatures in any behemoth media company, buzzing about each day thwarting new ideas or, worse, having “transformative” ideas of their own when what is usually required is to revive, with a bit of steadfast conviction, the originating creative purpose of the enterprise”.
My advice is to take both these thoughts very seriously as we march towards the end of 2008, the last of twenty years when journalists have known relative plenty, settled lives and predictable careers. Mental flexibility, yes. And getting back to the original creative purpose of the enterprise, yes.
But in one important way both Brown and Heffernan are very probably wrong: they both seem to think that the future is exclusively on the web. This is now such a widespread prediction it is like the belief that Canute thought he was more powerful than the sea or that the Earl of Sandwich invented the sandwich i.e. it is easier to agree than disagree.
However it is far more likely that the web will leap forward in more pervasive and exciting ways than we can currently perceive and that the same will be true of old media such as movies, radio, magazines and newspapers. There will be huge shifts between them of course. There may be more people using the internet and fewer people reading newspapers. But it is madly improbable that the older genres will be wiped out by the new.
Why?
The idea that a new technology abolishes a previous role is much too simplistic. In the history of culture it has never happened that something has simply killed something else. Something has profoundly changed something else. The Pharaoh told Hermes that his new invention, writing, would kill off memory. In fact writing gave people more to remember. Frollo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame says that the alphabet will kill images, the printing press will kill the cathedral (ceci tuera cela), but both the cathedral and the image have flourished mightily since Gutenberg. The photograph was meant to kill painting but Daguerre made Impressionism possible. After the invention of Daguerre, painters no longer felt obliged to serve as mere craftsmen charged with reproducing reality. Nor did photography only encourage abstract painting. There is a whole tradition in modern painting that could not exist without the photographic model (e.g. Hopper).
Precisely because the DNA of the web is profoundly different from the DNA of print or film or radio it will not replace those things. If it were the same (cassette tape/CD for instance) one might predict a swap. But it is becoming clear that it is not the same at all. Indeed as the web develops it is getting more distinctly and uniquely itself.
There is so much more to do with print. (Movable type has only been around since 1439!) Take newspapers. They have not fundamentally changed for over fifty years. They have gently evolved in every way, especially design and printing but have never been subject to a truly radical reinvention. Thanks to the web this will now happen and newspapers will be better. Just one example: no need any longer for long pages of share prices and TV listings, or of classified ads and news roundups. Newspapers can concentrate on the great yawning appetite of our age - the quest for meaning.
Between Heffernan’s sclerotic journalists and Brown’s zombie managers we are not getting things right. We can only dimly see the outlines of the way the web will work and it will not be the way we think. And, scared, we have turned our backs on print without seeing the potential that remains.
It will all come right in the end but we are taking the long way round.
Parting thought from a T shirt company: These T-shirts are made on the shamble and by imperfect people. Expect smudges.
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.
The Editor of the Daily Mail Paul Dacre does not need defending. He will never a) read this article or b) give two hoots about what it says. Nonetheless, this is a defence of Paul Dacre.
There is a personal reason for writing it, which is that I spent three enjoyable years working closely with Dacre at the Daily Mail when he was new to the editor’s chair. It was the time when he was remoulding the paper to his own image after the long rule of David English, and I suppose I had something to do with the shape of the paper which emerged and which has continued successfully to this day. So I am in part defending myself.
There is however a more important reason. In the circles where I live and work - typically middle class, non-ideological but educated - the Daily Mail needs a voice. Almost to a man and woman, these people identify the Mail with disastrous and deluded demagoguery. So powerful is the latent antipathy that any position the Mail takes is automatically rejected out of hand.
And yet the speech that Paul Dacre made at the Society of Editors last Sunday (Nov 9th 2008) will, I believe, come to be seen as a landmark in the contemporary discussion about journalism - containing the lineaments of a path to recovery for an industry that desperately needs re-invigorating and, without which, Britain would be massively worse off. Philosophically it belongs to a tradition of emotional populism that has had many champions in the West, from Wesley to Dickens to Philip Roth and the fiercely intellectual contemporary American scholar Martha Nussbaum. It is nothing to be ashamed of and still less to be sneered at.
The reaction to Dacre’s talk has been evidence of a shocking lack of attention, or perhaps just lack of intelligence (and this is from the supposed British intelligentsia).
On The First Post, the writer Neil Lyndon huffed and puffed about coverage of the McCanns and national papers that “traffic in degradation” without any sense that he had listened to Dacre’s argument for a rumbustiously entertaining press.
On his blog, Observer columnist Henry Porter criticised the Mail’s ‘inconsistency’ (the intellectual snob’s favourite word) in defending the right to expose the private antics of Max Moseley and attacking the government’s plans to store data on phone and web use, without appearing to understand the huge difference in principle between the misdemeanours of public figures and the innocent business of private citizens.
Charlie Beckett, the director of the media think tank Polis, merely pointed out that “many people do not think S&M is depraved”, forgetting perhaps that the Mail is not about ‘many’ it is about ‘most’.
Peter Wilby, the Guardian media columnist, says in his brilliantly acerbic style, that it is pernicious to attack the most trusted news source in the land (Beeb) and that without it we’d only be left with the distortions of the Mail. He must have missed Dacre’s previous assertions that he would “die in a ditch” to defend the need for a BBC but that he was trying to take a stand against its incursion into every nook and cranny of national life.
Most vehement of all was Polly Toynbee in her Guardian column. Among other things she attacked Dacre’s twisted logic for saying that Mr Justice Eady, the judge in the Moseley case, might have felt very differently if his wife or daughter had been one of the prostitutes in uniform. No logic was intended. Dacre’s point is an emotional one. He does not think that anybody’s wife or daughter should be treated like Moseley treated his willing accomplices in S&M. Indeed the twisted logic is Toynbee’s argument that there is an equivalence between torturers and newspapers who expose people.
The Guardian letters page today contains a clutch of readers cockily pointing out the difference for the millionth time between ‘interesting to the public’ and ‘public interest’. But whenever Dacre defends the press right to expose public figures he is patently clear. He is talking about public interest. Joe Calzaghe would as likely confuse ‘punch’ with a fruit drink.
The headlines after the speech focussed on Dacre’s attack on Mr Justice Eady and on the expansion of the BBC. But the speech is not primarily about either of these points. It is primarily a defence of populism.
The emotional populist, such as Dacre, believes that ordinary people have instincts and reactions which, if properly tapped, will be sufficient to provide guidance and authority to the statesman. He supports the people versus the elites. Long passages of his speech last Sunday were a tribute to the great populists who shaped his career; a previous generation of newspaper editors such as John Junor and Arthur (We never waste space saying, “On the one hand.” We just state an opinion in a Godlike voice) Christiansen, legendary editor of Beaverbook’s Express and tireless champion of the little man.
Of course any of these editors will take a stand again the pink-cheeked judge and the smug BBC. Of course they will rail against the loss-making liberal-left papers that think that they know best and have a right to stick their views down people’s throats (however good these papers actually are, and they are). What is shocking is that this should offend so many people so deeply. Why? Are we still so class-ridden that we are afraid of the convictions of around one in three of our countrymen? Do we yearn so strongly for the infinitely more elitist culture of continental Europe?
I believe that the press, in its current crisis, is betraying itself. It is so distracted by commercial, technological and cultural problems that it is very seriously missing the point. I bemoaned last week the shocking lack of innovation and inventiveness among newspaper managements. However it is just as important to recognise the shocking lack of ability among editors and journalists to connect with a readership and write with sufficient passion about anything worth caring for. The British press is still among the best in the world. But the steady growth of flimsy, pointless opinion writing combined with predictable, turgid and irrelevant news is the real problem. Blaming the internet, the advertising downturn and the price of paper is a lame excuse.
Dacre’s speech was a call to arms. His paper practises populism his way. There are other ways. Did anyone listen?
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.
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).
As you can see, we have redesigned ourselves. As part of the process we are also going to end our summer hiatus from blogging - its officially wet, cold and gloomy here so we feel obligated. Richard is going to write a weekly column every Tuesday and I am going to try to do more little things throughout the week. In the meantime, any comments on the new design (here and on the main page) are always appreciated.
Barak Obama claims that he is raising a $1m a day, mostly online and mostly in the form of relatively small donations from private individuals. This sort of political “micro-philanthropy” is a thoroughly modern affair (see Peter Deitz’ amazing slideshow on the phenomenon–one interesting point: in Apr ‘07 distributed fundraising sites more than $3m; see also ChipIn for a widget version). Or, at least, that is what I had always thought. Then this morning, I heard a piece on the Statue of Liberty on Radio 4 that revealed the true father of “micro-philanthropy” - Joseph Pulitzer.
In post Civil War America (postbellum?), newspapers were a genuinely powerful force. The invention of more efficient and cheaper printing presses and an increasingly urban demographic allowed newspapers to become a populist medium for the first time. As a result, papers had enormous influence on the issues of the day. One of the world’s great campaigning newspapers, Joseph Pulitzer’s The World (see page on left) is from this era and is at least partially responsible for bringing the France’s greatest gift (besides all that help with the pesky red coats), the Statue of Liberty, to New York. (There is also one in Tokyo - see photo above courtesy of Stefan on flickr and also one in Paris)
France generously offered the huge, 151 ft statue as a gift, leaving the United States to pay only for the plinth on which it would stand. Alas, most of the fat cats in the country thought of the statue as a New York momument that had nothing to do with the rest of the country and refused to stump for the plinth. But, then Pulitzer got on the case, haranguing both the rich for not caring about their country and poor for expecting the rich to do all the work. The result? Money literally poured in, a great deal of it from school children sending in pennys to see their name in print and to give to what was suddenly seen as a worthy cause. Today, of course, this sort of social movement would start and end on Facebook of Bebo.
This is a crucial lesson for today’s far less powerful newspapers. They need to go retro and engage, even uncover, issues people really care about. They need to become rallying points again.
While the rest of us were enjoying the weirdly summer-ish sun this weekend, The Guardian web people were inside, no doubt monitor-tanning while perfecting the latest phase of their (slowly but surely) redesign of guardian.co.uk. Not any huge changes (if you don’t count the marketing decision to drop Guardian Unlimited in favor of the more sanguine and comprehensible guardian.co.uk–a good choice I say), mostly just extending the redesign introduced last year to new sections. Some areas are more successful than others (I am not sure about the new colorful section menu, its much harder to read) but it generally still looks good. I love the simplicity of it - it isn’t plagued with any of the clutter that web designers are often tempted by (see The Times).
Of course, any “clean” look is largely influenced by the number of ads on the page and, in The Guardian’s case that number is 0. This adlessness might simply be a product of the new look going through (though I don’t recall the site having many ads on a normal day) but even so, its a strange piece of strategy. The site is getting something on the order of 17 million users a month, not to monetize them just seems crazy. As a designer, though, its a dream come true. Ads are something you can’t control and, on a webpage, they are inevitably more colorful, dynamic and motionful than the necessarily staid news-design they sit next to.
Also, a special word for guardian.co.uk editor-in-chief Emily Bell who admirably (and honestly) answered all comers to her blogpost on the changes. Very impressive.
For the past two mornings in my rather cold but lovingly quaint flat (its those windows there above the dairy - shannylea at flickr) I have been struck with premonitions, small, dusty thoughts that emerge from nowhere. I am not ashamed to admit that they are the most important thoughts the world has ever seen. Today, for instance, I was struck with this doozie: WordPress is going to take over the world (yesterday’s portent, by the way, was far less important - John McCain is the next president of the United States. I am hoping it is more unconscious prediction/fear than unconscious desire).
My ghost thoughts are very demanding and declarative, aren’t they? But rightly so, I suppose, I do think, even now in the bright light of day, that WordPress, a blogging platform created by Automattic (who just got some investment from the New York Times), might actually be a world conquerer. What has swung me from dispassionate user (this blog is on WordPress) to faithful follower is the revelation that the platform is powerful and extensible enough to allow people like you and me (or even my little nephew) to create viable, modern and beautiful newspaper or magazine websites. From scratch. For free. And this isn’t just pie in the sky, its already being used by the Express and Star in Wolverhampton.
I admit that I am a tad late to this but I promise to make up for my tardiness with some good old-fasionhed zealotry. And I have a feeling both of the readers of this blog will have my back. Just look at the variousthemes that I discovered today. With a tweak here and there these could be just as good as The Guardian, The New York Times or the Telegraph. Amazing. And game changing. I just hope my little premonitions are always so right on.
Apple’s new music recommendation tool, the Genius button is….genius. It’s not a new idea by any means - see 
In post Civil War America (postbellum?), newspapers were a genuinely powerful force. The invention of more efficient and cheaper printing presses and an increasingly urban demographic allowed newspapers to become a populist medium for the first time. As a result, papers had enormous influence on the issues of the day. One of the world’s great campaigning newspapers,