Melding Print and Online Coverage

The online news realm: It’s a place of limitless space, free access and healthy competition.

The newspaper: It’s physically constrained by an always too small news hole, useful for a day or week, and geographically limited.

It is time for newspaper management to wake up to the fact that their online news and their print news are two fundamentally different beasts, and reporters and editors need to approach their stories with this in mind.

After their morning coffee, they might next realize that organization of their content will make or break their bottom line.

What does this have to do with news design? A whole lot.

The traditional approach to a newspaper’s online coverage has been to transfer stories that were used in print onto the online news site, word for word, and to better organize related coverage through links to similar articles. The great debate has been how much of the content should be freely accessible to non-subscribers, and whether logins are required to view all content on the site. The fear was that by being freely open to anyone who arrived at the site, perhaps the print version of the newspaper would lose value and subscribers. The other great fear was someday waking up to a news world where the old-time newspapers had stopped becoming the place to get the news.

Doing nothing was not an option, so stories went online, either freely accessible and relatively complete or in a more limited nature.

But no traditional newspaper that I know of has transformed its print version to reflect its newfound freedom and possibilities.

There are lots of options here, and it’s high time newspapers, especially smaller ones that are financially challenged, should take advantage of them.

Let’s start with what is wrong with the traditional approach to coordinating print and online news design.

A newspaper should not put the same versions of stories online as it does in print. Why regurgitate the news? Why even buy the print version? Why limit the online coverage to the carefully lopped-off versions of the stories that didn’t fit in their entirety in the print version? Why limit reporters to the space they have in print when the reporters have so much more to say that can be put online?

The news print is the precious commodity, so let’s start by not throwing minutiae in there that bores most readers into turning on the TV. The newspaper probably needs to be smaller and definitely needs to be more interesting.

How do you use your news hole more effectively? Designers should show ways to do this.

Here is my suggestion: Put online anything that is targeted to the few. Tell everybody it’s there.

What’s left in print is room to cover the major local, national and world events of the day, with all of the photos and comprehensive analysis that make newspapers shine. There is also room to more clearly organize content and online information for the micro-communities within a town or city.

Take a few examples: That 25-inch meeting story from the southeast district of West Timbuktu? Turn it into a four-inch tease to a 35-inch version online. Those wily West Timbuktuans will really appreciate the extra detail there. And the rest of us can quickly see that those West Timbuktuans are consumed with some crazy sewage-access issues that we don’t care a wit about. Using this approach won’t take away much space in our newspaper. We’d rather read about the rabid foxes menacing the bus stop down the street. A short story about the bus stop with a longer version online would probably catch our interest.

What this approach leads to are multiple versions of the same story. A shorter one in many instances ends up in print. And a longer one resides on the online site.

One problem with using varying versions of stories is a newspaper’s desire to be a historic record. Which version of the story becomes the story of record? If a choice has to be made, it’s not the one in print. The longer story, with all of the related links and opportunities to make corrections (clearly noted online, of course), is the story the newspaper should stand behind and the one that lasts as the months and years go by.

Those obituaries? Put them online where out-of-town relatives can download longer and more detailed news obituaries than ever had room to run in print. The community can see whose obituaries are online in an expanded listing with mug shots and refers to the online obituaries.

What does this have to do with news design? It’s high time news designers took personally their lack of control over what goes where in the paper and online. We are the experts at display. So stand up and put on your thinking caps. Start showing editors the way forward.

Once a newspaper accepts that its organization of content is all wrong, then it’s time to roll up the sleeves with a new and much more critical eye at what should go into print.

It is at this point that we as designers can truly be creative, both in fashioning the structure of the new newspaper and in having the expanse to treat stories as they deserve to be.