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Articles by Dhyana Sansoucie
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The oversold story
Tell me if you’ve been here before.
You’re sitting in the Page One meeting and hearing about a photo/story package the paper has been working on all day. You have lots of great pictures and the story line is compelling.
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Size matters
What size newspaper do readers want?
If a hundred readers were polled and asked if they preferred their newspaper to be bigger or smaller, I believe most would choose a smaller newspaper. But I’m an environmentalist of sorts. And I know how to find news online.
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Ways to save tab design
As I see it, there are three ways to do good tab design if you’re a newspaper and want to leave the broadsheet behind.
There may be more ways to do good tab design. I just haven’t thought of them.
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Reporters need a little freedom
Where’s Napoleon when you need him? I want that army of reporters brought under control.
And I want to let that horde of reporters have just a little freedom in their own little play pen that we should create for them.
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Tab musings
What’s a tab if not an ugly magazine with a bad table of contents?
It’s not glossy and it’s hard to navigate.
People say tab design is our future? I hope we fix its shortcomings before we adopt it.
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Ad dollars, Google and independence
I just had an interesting conversation with Scott Karp over at his Publishing 2.0 site regarding the role of Google, niche sites trying to get noticed and how they feed Google’s profits.
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Free newspapers are our future
Twenty-four hour cable news shows, Internet news sites, Google and Yahoo news home pages, Internet news aggregators, news magazines, entertainment news, financial news shows, financial Web sites, sports shows, ESPN, your local and national newspapers: There is an avalanche of news coming at us every day. And almost without exception, it’s all free.
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Eyetrack studies for online news sites
Poynter has taken a first stab at examining how readers interact with online news sites by testing their eye movements and the ways they click around a site. The results in many ways are surprising and well worth studying.
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Basking in heat from above
If your newspaper is anything like my newspaper, you would have noticed stirrings of change coming down, surprisingly this time, from above.
From my view, pressure is building to embrace online news delivery — resistance has crumbled, if not outright vanished. It’s not just the little guys and gals in the trenches wanting to experiment and try new ideas. Ideas that once would have marked me as a maverick to rein in suddenly get noticed and embraced. One year ago I saw skepticism and hesitation; today we can’t move fast enough to please the powers that be.
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Outcompete your neighbors online
Are you ignoring the town next door?
Newspapers live in the land of terra firma. Each newspaper primarily covers the communities it can reach, with a car and a print subscription. Yes, the paper itself probably covers the entire world with the assistance of the wire services, but the target audience is local.
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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?
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The squeeze is on
How’s your news hole treating you lately? Does it feel like a slowly shrinking universe out there? Are those stock listings and that big display weather page starting to look a little less inviting than they once did? If you’re dealing with the industry blues, trying to fit all of the same content into a smaller and smaller tome, you’re probably tired of dealing with the coping strategies and ready to rethink the whole endeavor.
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Breaking News Design
Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes … There are days when you begin designing A1 and you just know you’re bound to need to redesign your page later in the evening.
Usually this is because a big story is out there, but the big news has not yet broken. The important photos have not yet moved. The story could end up in limbo at presstime or it could fade back into a less important story or it could tremendously grow in importance.
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Design Software at Newspapers
Many newspapers seem to be making the switch to InDesign, and many are considering it.
QuarkXPress or InDesign? Both have their pros and cons.This is not the place to provide an expert opinion on the matter, since I have been using InDesign for less than a year and with just one companion software, JazBox. But this could be a place to make some initial comments about the difference between our new software and our old newspaper software, a combination of Quark and DewarView. Others could add their opinions on their own software.
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High School Sports Coverage: Design Tips
Covering high school sports to the satisfaction of the local community is one of those Catch 22 challenges of a sports section.
No one is ever satisfied. Either your sports section focuses primarily on local school sports to the dismay of the average sports fan or your sports department gives most of its effort and room to covering professional sports, leaving your local parents and coaches feeling unappreciated and undercovered. More often, the complaints come in from both sides.
As much as a staffing challenge, this is a space and design challenge. Given the room you have to fill with sports news, there is simply no way to cover everything and choices must be made.
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Who Does Bastard Measures Right?
Let’s turn a critical eye on the lowly bastard measure.
We’ll start with a definition … in case someone has strayed upon this who probably shouldn’t have.
Every newspaper has a grid. Common grids are five or six columns wide, although grids of 10 or 12 are used, and hybrid approaches should be more fully explored here in the future. A standard newspaper column (one leg of type in a news story) usually is placed on the grid, so that a six-column grid has six legs of type if the story stretches across the entire page. This is probably the most common set up. If a 10- or 12-column grid were used, the leg of type would stretch across two grid columns. A bastard measure is any leg of type that strays from the standard width in use in the newspaper.
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Sports Design: Leaving Game Stories Behind
Sports design is not what it used to be. At least, it shouldn’t be. The days of game stories filling your sports section are numbered. Getting your editors to recognize this is the task at hand.
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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.
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