Hamstrung Page One design

Page One design faces the design challenge of being the most important page in the newspaper: It’s the jumping off point for the rest of the paper, the place to showcase the big stories, and faces the constricts of above-the-fold design. Are you tired of your Page One marching orders?

You will be asked to fit a lot on the page, and at the top of the page. This makes sense. The problem arises when your page day after day can’t break out of its routine to really reflect the individuality of that day’s news.

There must be enlightened Page One meetings going on in this country for daily broadsheet newspapers. I just haven’t seen many in the past 10 years.

I have lived in the land of regular expectations: where five stories belong on the front page. Yes, there are rare exceptions, but these are usually backed into at the end of the meeting based on the photo and art demands of the day. Or occasionally the news is so beyond the realm of normal that the one-story front, perhaps with a sidebar or two, is the de facto choice. But what about the in-between days that most should probably be?

Somehow decisions have gotten stuck within a constricting framework. Editors pitch their stories. Photos and graphics are viewed. Discussion on particular stories take place. But no discussion takes place as to what kind of news day it is. And then out comes the decision to run the standard number of top stories. Here you go. Do something different today, though, will you? You have five stories, lead art, secondary art, three refers and an index. Just like yesterday. And the day before. Do I exaggerate? Yes, but only slightly.

There needs to be a point in time when editors step back after all of the story pitches are made and decide just what is special and deserving of the front page that day. There should be a lot of different answers to this from day to day, from story counts to the number of refers to inside stories, to the real estate on the page that certain stories deserve. First decide what is deserving and then decide how to accomplish it. The number of stories should not be part of the equation.

Sometimes three stories may dominate the news. Sometimes there are 10 important or compelling stories. How do you fit ten stories on the front page? You really can’t using traditional methods, unless you count your refers to inside stories as Page One starts. Perhaps you should, but are these doing justice to the news?

There are other ways to do this. Here are some ways to use the front page that may not be in your newspaper’s palette, along with my opinions on each:

The rail

The rail in my opinion is very useful and well-received by readers. Generally it is a column on the left side of the page filled with briefs that refer readers to longer stories inside. Some newspapers use headline-style teases with subheds instead of briefs. Some designers may find it constricting … it’s hard to run 6-column photos … and they still may have the same number of stories to fit in the main area of the page that they always faced. It should allow the rest of the page to be more flexible, though, especially if editors are satisfied that the rail is good enough placement on the front page and the rest of the story can go inside. Many editors will not be satisfied with this, though, and the story count on the main area of the page will likely be high. When big news comes around, though, the rail will be a useful way to keep the main area of the page open, and big news has sway with editors. This is a good way to get a lot of news on the front page. Newspapers that use the rail include USA Today, the San Jose Mercury News and The Miami Herald.

The inside box

The inside box is much more flexible than the rail, in that it can be limited to two or three teases to important stories, or can be expanded to seven or eight. It’s placement on the page can be very flexible. I find that in practice the inside area seems harder to do well, perhaps because less time is spent on it each day than in the original design of the rail. The quality of the designer will be much more important if this area will be flexible enough to take a variety of approaches. Newspapers that use the inside device on the front page include The New York Times and the Hartford Courant.

The elbow

This seems to me to be a relatively recent device, similar to a rail and skybox, but having the two combined into one L-shaped element across the top and down the left side. Personally I’d like to see more examples of these.

The tease that looks like a story

This refer looks like a story. To me this is a very promising area that newspapers should make more use of. I have seen these used in Scandinavian European tabloids, although I do not know what term these newspapers use for them. What appears to be a story, complete with headline and fairly prominent placement on the main area of the front page is instead a one paragraph summarization of the story, which actually starts on another page. This seems like a very good way to get the news prominently on the front page but still allows for creative design and headline use on the real story inside the newspaper. Using a few of these on your section front would make it easier to increase story counts and display important stories that don’t make the Page One full-story grade. How do you handle those important but boring stories? Bingo! You could also more easily give a lot of real estate to the main story or two of the day.

How do you begin incorporating these elements without a redesign of your front page? You won’t get a rail or an elbow, but you could create a larger variety of ways to tease to inside stories. The more these appear to be Page One stories that take up a smaller amount of real estate on your page than traditional story starts, the more effective these teases will be, both in how readily editors will decide to use them and in how important readers will view them. Once you have created them and showed your editors how they could be used, you can suggest them during your Page One meeting as a way to handle the particular importance that many stories deserve: not quite a Page One story, but not buried by any means.

In this way, you would have more ways to present the day’s news by having a greater variety of devices to call on. You could run two stories, one story or five stories, with a handful of elements that closely resemble stories also on your page. By freeing your page from the constricts of the same story count day after day, you would on many days have room to really play up your most important story of the day. Your page over time would have a lot more variety to its presentation.

The problem, though, arises from the expectations ingrained in editors. You can show them new ways to handle stories on the front page. Now if you could just get your editors to step back during the Page One meeting and really take a look at how to craft Page One, instead of regurgitating a well-worn format that fails to adequately convey the news and adds to the “same-old same-old” quality of the newspaper.

And one final note … This is not entirely the editor’s fault. They know stories. This is partly your fault. Perhaps you haven’t shown them the possibilities.