Are Graphic Designers Killing Newspapers?
Kevin
G. Barnhurst, Ph.D. ©
Syracuse
University (USA)
The end
of the twentieth century is rife with predictions of the demise of newspapers. The
futurist Alvin Toffler called the newspaper business "the last of the
smokestack industries." U.S. newspapers have lost 20 percent of their
readers since the 1970s, the number of newspapers in the U.S. has declined 10
percent since 1955, and in the same period the number of U.S. cities with
separately owned newspapers has fallen from 94 to 33. Based on these
statistics, The Economist called newspapers "decrepit, dated and destined
to die."
Computerized
information sources appear to present the latest threat to newspapers. Jonathan
Katz, in the pages of Wired magazine, called newspapers "the biggest and
saddest losers in the information revolution."
And
Michael Crichton, writing later in the same venue, predicted that within a decade,
newspapers and other mass media as we know them, will "vanish without a
trace." In response to a question about computers and the future of print
journalism, Gene Roberts of the New York Times said, "I think the only
thing print journalism really has to fear is its on owners and managers."
Here is
how Roger Fidler, formerly with Knight-Ridder, envisioned the computer news: As
a download-able, digitized stream displayed on a flat panel, the computerized
news would be clean; it would produce no waste. It could be selective, catering
to any reader's particular interests. It could also provide more information,
limited only by the memory of the machine or the time it takes to download
more. It would be faster to absorb, especially for those who use search engines
to scan, and faster to distribute, over wires that skip the laborious
manufacturing of a paper product. News sent out and downloaded immediately
would be fresher, more current than day-old print.
The
response of newspapers to this electronic threat can be witnessed in an example
from Asia: The New Paper of Singapore. Newspapers are adopting electronic
layout techniques, which are flexible and somewhat compatible with other
electronic devices. They are segmenting their markets, to produce zoned editions
that narrowly target reader interests and advertiser markets. They are
maintaining information, including everything from sports scores to school
homework assignments, in databases accessible by telephone. Some newspapers
such as this one are printing information in bar-codes, so that the reader who,
let's say, likes a television review can run a hand-held scanner over the
accompanying bar code, which programs the VCR to record the show. Newspapers
are also encoding their advertising as information, providing access to
restaurant menus and movie listings through home computer modems.
Another
response of newspaper executives is to develop a separate non-paper product,
the electronic newspaper. Ads appearing in the New York Times hawk an on-line
version of the combined information that has appeared in the Times and in its
competitor the Wall Street Journal. Electronic newspapers open the possibility
that publishers may someday abandon paper entirely, saving themselves and their
customers money and reaping all the benefits of the digital age. This strategy
is considered farsighted and visionary response to the decline in readers and
rise in electronic competitors.
The Logic of Redesign
The
concept behind all these strategic moves by newspapers is this: That the
business of newspapers is information. Journalists aren't in the newspaper
business, they're in the information business, and unless they recognize this
central fact, they will lead newspapers into ruin. The commonly cited analogy
used to explain and justify the information concept is the railroad. At their
height, American railroads inspired a whole generation to admiration. The
romance of the rails spurred collectors, miniaturists, and hobbyists, as well
as movie-makers and youngsters, and also motivated the grown-ups who entered
railroading as a career. As this romance took center stage, the argument goes,
the railroad industry forgot it was really in the transportation business. It
did not respond to the changes in technology that allowed the automobile and
airplane to compete for passenger traffic, and the trucking industry and air
shipping to compete for freight. Little by little, railroad executives yielded
ground to these alternatives in the United States. To do otherwise would have
required that they give up what was essential about railroading - thephysical
form of rails and trains, from engine to caboose - and get on with the business
of transport, whatever its form. As a consequence, railroads faced becoming
little more than museum pieces from a quaint and bygone era.
This
concept, and the analogy that sustains it, are completely wrongheaded. Passion
is important - absolutely central to the survival of print journalism. In fact,
without the passion of the rails, that very useful form of transport, ideally
suited to the economies of scale needed in global markets, might have been
lost. In journalism, the passion to inform the public, and the public's passion
to know, gave newspapers their form. Each aspect of the newspaper -its format
and binding, inked typography and pictures, physical arrangement of items in
space- grew out of that passion. Rather than offering a big-hearted argument to
save newspapers, the information concept and its accompanying analogy function
as a tool or lever to move the culture away from newspapers.
To undo
a pattern of cultural practice that has taken centuries to create requires a
very clever tool. This one is called synecdoche, the use of a part to stand for
the whole. Referring to newspapers as information names the whole by only one
of its parts, an important one, but still only part. What gets excluded? Why,
it's the form of information that's left out. The best way to attack something
so deeply ingrained is to go around it, to ignore and sidestep it. By this
small device, it is possible to completely change how we look at newspapers. Unlike
a paper, about which journalists are the experts, information is the province
of other professionals. News-as-information opens the paper to marketers,
programmers, and graphic designers.
The
history of dying American newspapers is strewn with designers. When major
newspapers get into trouble, they bring in design consultants.
In
1966, when one of the grandest New York newspapers, The Herald-Tribune, was
ailing, designers came in as saviors. But the design change was so great, it
scared away readers (and may have startled investors). So instead of saviors,
the designers performed a role much closer to that of morticians. A similar
ritual occurred when the Chicago Daily News ran aground in 1978. As the U.S.
newspaper industry has fallen on hard times since the 1970s, the pattern of
redesign has become widespread. This may be pure coincidence, but I think not. Newspaper
executives are aware of the loss of readers and the competition for
advertisers, as well as the high cost of newsprint, and they have entered into
a series of efforts to restructure news to reposition their papers in the
market.
Most of
these efforts involve a repackaging of news as information. Editors have
created info-capsules that break news into bite-sized bits of information. Self-promotional
sky-boxes, which run high on the front page, are the most widely used format
for teasers, which apply the techniques and vocabulary of advertising to lure
readers into the information. A more basic way of treating news as information
is by supplying readers with detailed indexes, which have recently expanded
from the small list of major sections and heavily trafficked items (like the
television listings) to more detailed lists, highlighting top articles or
indexing advertisers. The goal, in design parlance, is to provide more
"entrances" into the information content, so that readers are more
likely to link up. One of the greatest uses of space for this purpose is the
so-called "chimneys" of news briefs, which usually run in the left
column of each section front and summarize the major articles appearing inside.
Besides
these editorial changes, there have been design changes specifically planned to
make information attractive (and here you can see just how the logic works). News
is by definition racy, exciting, and sometimes salacious. Information is dry,
undifferentiated matter. It requires dolling up. One of the most important
means of making information seem more appetizing is to paint it with color, but
there are others, such as using particular design styles, illustration or
typographic treatments, and the like. Information can't stand alone; it
requires fancy packaging and added ingredients (which take up space). In
effect, instead of having the newspaper present news as journalists understand
it, this new concept of news as "information" requires the services
of window dressers and cake decorators, in a word: artists.
The Values of Artists
If
artists are to be in charge of information, it might be worth the trouble to
examine what it is that artists admire. What passions do they pursue? What
excites them? Artists are not an undifferentiated lot.
They
come in specific varieties: typographers, illustrators, infographic artists,
and page designers as well as photographers and so forth.
Typographers
who specialize in text design, that is the body copy or textual matter, are
great admirers of the book. John Baskerville's eighteenth century setting of
the Latin Virgil is a good example of what drives typographers. They like
textual matter to be set at a reasonable size, on wide columns that approach
the grace of a classical book page.
They
are greatly interested in legibility, which allows the letterforms and words to
be clearly perceived. They search for type that is elegant but unobtrusive,
able to convey the content without drawing attention to itself. When left to
design newspaper text, these typographers will introduce something like the
award-winning pages of The Washington Times: goodly size, widish columns,
handsome initials. Each column of type comes close to achieving the legibility
of a book page.
Typographic
designers who work in advertising and display are of a different breed. Many of
them are influenced by the modernist side of type design. Jan Tschichold's 1927
design of a poster for the play "Kiki" illustrates this movement. It
uses asymmetrical balance for the letterforms on the generous pools of white
space, with broad bars or ribbons in black and red as counter-weight. These
effects motivate the typographic designer,along with some of the classical
qualities already mentioned. When newspapers are handled by typographic
designers, they are likely to produce something like the fashion pages from the
daily Novedades in Mexico City.
The
section head imitates Tschichold's use of generous sized display type, in which
the form of the letters act as an illustration of the conceptstyle, set off by
heavy ruled line or bar in contrasting color.
When
asked what they most seek to emulate, illustrators, like typographers, never
say "newspapers." What illustrators admire i the
nineteenth-century
poster. Lithographs by the master Henri Toulouse-Lautrec demonstrate the large
scale, strong composition, and areas of expressive color that characterize the
heyday of the art poster. Cut loose on a newspaper page, any illustrator worth
the salt would have a hard time complaining about the illustrations that appear
in El Nuevo Día, published in Puerto Rico. The large scale of a typical
illustration on its pages occupies more than half the broadsheet page. The use
of color and line provide a quality of whimsy and style that illustrators
value.
The
designers of charts and diagrams, so-called "infographics," also hold
large-scale work in high regard (this is a pattern throughout the visual arts),
but they also want encyclopedic information. Perhaps the most admired example
of the design of information has been championed by Edward Tufte, who publishes
his own edition of a data-map designed by Minard in 1861 to show the fate of
Napoleon's army. In that map, the width of lines shows the size of the army at
any location along its route to Russia and back. A temperature scale below ties
the shrinking army to the chilling temperatures. Little wonder that infographic
designers, who can pore for hours over Popular Mechanics-style charts, will
produce work like the much-admired early example in the Allentown (Pa.) Morning
Call, showing the process of hurricane formation. Once again these graphics
occupy roughly half the page, but the area is rich with factual details about
theformation of a hurricane. This is great stuff by any standard, well beyond
what newspapers ran in previous eras.
About
my esteemed colleagues, the photographers, I am not an expert, so I will say
little except that even the most committed photojournalists among them do
admire the expansive displays of the old Life magazine and secretly dream of
having their work displayed alone on a gallery wall.
My own
career began as a page designer, and so I can say more about my fellow layout
artists. As a group, especially in my generation, we were great admirers of
abstract art. After all, a layout is really a tasteful arrangement of
rectangles. A composition by Mondrian could very well be a newspaper page, with
the strong bar of red standing for the nameplate, above the various blocks of
gray type and rectangular photographs and ribbon-like headlines. Viewing
Mondrian as a news layout is not so great a stretch, once you look at the pages
of the Washington Times. The Mondrian echoes not only in the nameplate but also
in the red bar setting it off from the day's content. The play of vertical type
against horizontal photographs has much of the aesthetic appeal of fine
abstract art. The grid that organizes everything on the pages is what gets
layout artists excited.
In
another well-known page, from the day the leader of the Shining Path guerilla
movement got arrested, El Comercio, the leading newspaper of Perú, showed how
underlying grids work to create unity. By a happy coincidence, the verticals
and horizontals in the main photograph of the terrorist behind bars repeat the
vertical columns and dividers and horizontal bars and spaces underlying the
entire front page. The influence of Mondrian again turns up in the ribbons of
color around the nameplate.
Consequences
All of
this design is beautiful to look at. But when we give free reign to the ideals
of these many kinds of artists, what happens to the news? What happens to the
newspaper? Much of my book, Seeing the Newspaper, explores the consequences. As
pictures get larger, other things must go, either off the front page or out of
the newspaper. As display type gets larger, each word in a headline costs a
premium. And some of the additions to the newspaper are of questionable value. Some
detailed and highly decorated information graphics are indecipherable. Adding
promotional sky-boxes and other items often duplicates information. And bad
color abounds.
A
newspaper is like real estate. Some places like the front page are exclusive
neighborhoods, highly desirable and exacting a premium. Yet in the last century
-as measured in my study with the historian John Nerone- everything on the
front page got bigger. That meant fewer things would fit. The number of items
-pictures, headlines, text blocks, and ads- went from almost 50 to fewer than
10. The number of stories went from almost 25 to fewer than 6, and the number
of words -a gross indicator of how much will fit in a given size of type- went
from 12,000 to 4400.
In the
United States, editors are now faced with attracting readers from many
different groups in society. The makeup of cities i changing, becoming more
diverse. The growing numbers of ethnic groups, racial and cultural minorities,
and immigrants, as well as women and young adults, turn away if their own
interests go unreported in the news columns or get buried inside. What binds
readers to newspapers is seeing themselves, their families and friends, in the
pages. In my research with Ellen Wartella, an expert on youth and media, young
adults reported that having their own name or picture in the paper was a
significant spur that turned them into readers. But the changes in newspaper
design -the larger pictures, graphics and headlines, and the generous text
type- all work to squeeze out these new readers. Young people, as well as women
and many minorities, very rarely make the front pages and only occasionally
appear inside. Their news gets shunted into special interest ghettos, if it
appears at all (see "Extra!"). By pushing for and winning larger text
type (to make it more legible), larger, more elegant headlines, bigger, more
dominant photographs, and grander information graphics, artists have thus
created a structural barrier to diversity in the newspaper.
Yet
redesigns continue to become more common in the United States. When artists
start saying a newspaper looks dated or needs a face-lift, they reveal a
fundamental misconception about newspapers. Unlike other consumer products,
newspapers are out-of-date the day they're published. With preservatives, even
bread has a longer shelf-life. Yet most redesigns are motivated by an urge to
make the visible form of news appeal to the current fashion taste.
The
idea that design can increase a product's attractiveness emerged in the 1930s. Marketers
were faced with consumers who were so buffeted by depression economics in the
United States that they stopped making purchases. In an effort to pry open
their pocketbooks, marketers hatched the notion of style obsolescence. By
adding distinctive styling features, a manufacturer adds a new sort of value to
a product. The old product might still have the same intrinsic usefulness, but
when a new, restyled model comes out, the old product looks passé. It has
become obsolete because of its surface appearance. In their groundbreaking work
in that era, Egmont Arens and Ray Sheldon proposed restyling as "a new
technique for prosperity." Consumers (women were a special target) would
become dissatisfied with their old models and open up their handbags and spend!
It was a strategy for the moment, applying an idea from clothing fashion
merchandising to durable goods. It spread quickly beyond automobiles to less
durable items such as newspapers.
When
applied to newspapers, style obsolescence has an unintended effect. It scares
consumers away. That is why redesigns since the 1930s have so often
foreshadowed the death of newspapers. The first redesigns applied streamlining
to the typography of headlines, following pioneer designer John Allen. The
asymmetrical streamline is best known from the Art Deco styling of the Hoover
vacuum by Henry Dreyfus, the Electrolux vacuum of Norman Bel Geddes, and the
Tide and Chlorox packaging by Donald Deskey (see "Packaging"). In a
close reading of newspapers of the 1930s, the historian John Nerone and I found
that radical redesign was a characteristic of newspapers that failed. Restyling
does not build consumer desire for the newest model because the news itself
changes every day, often so radically that the entire face of the newspaper
seems to change. In newspapers, design itself functions differently, providing
a constant that binds the reader to a routine purchase. It provides an anchor,
a reliable and familiar face, which remains the same despite the constantly
changing expressions of news.
A
wonderful example of design and obsolescence comes from York, Pennsylvania. In
the early 1980s, two newspapers were being published independently, the
afternoon Dispatch and the morning Daily Record. The Daily Record looked like
this: It had an updated nameplate in a modern Roman type, large flush-left
headlines, a dominant photo, and horizontal layout with legible type, an index,
and promotional sky-boxes. Each of the section heads was unified in design,
using a then-popular bold Helvetica.
Advertising
was cleared from entire pages, or was neatly grouped into rectangles on pages
where it appeared.
The
competitor Dispatch looked completely different. Its old fashioned nameplate
included an engraved device with the look of something from the nineteenth
century. Headlines were small, in condensed capitals, each line step-indented
in a form common in the Edwardian era. Photos were absent or small, and the
layout was vertical. The logos and signatures were all a jumble of styles,
using contrasting type. Advertising was piled in pyramids at the bottom of
pages. Despite all these old fashioned effects, this newspaper wasn't something
from history. It was published day after day to compete with the Daily Record I
just described. And the gray Dispatch was the dominant newspaper in the market.
In 1984 an editor from The Daily Record attended a conference where he
complained that his paper was doing all the right things with design and
photography - had hired designer Rob Covey to produce do its design in 1979 -
but was unable to win any of the loyal readers away from the old-fashioned
Dispatch. The Daily Record tried again in 1988, hiring The New York Times
designer Lou Silverstein.
But
then, in 1989, the Dispatch also redesigned, about the time that its
circulation began to fall behind, and it signed a joint operating agreement
with the Daily Record. The Record soon surpassed the Dispatch in circulation,
42,000 to 39,000. By 1994, the two newspapers had again been redesigned so that
one was almost indistinguishable from the other. They both had dominant photos
on the front pages, as well as a column of briefs and an index on the left. The
Dispatch added promotional sky boxes and a weather icon. Only the nameplates
contained a vestige of the original designs. The two newspapers melded into a
single entity for the new, jointly published York Sunday News. The Dispatch was
rumored to be in trouble and facing a possible sale or closure. This example
suggests that at the very least, something gets lost when newspapers engage in
periodic redesigns to update their image.
Resilient Paper
Newspapers,
as paper products, have great resilience when journalists, instead of artists,
hold the reins. That is to say that journalists are much more likely to carry
on the romance of paper, treating news as news and not as its pale sister,
information. As physical objects, newspapers function - and will survive in
America - on several levels, none of which can be easily reproduced in
electronic form.
First,
the newspaper is a object infused with a certain value in the society. Its
symbolism in popular culture gets reinforced constantly in novels, films, and
television programs. People who carry newspapers are identified as being in the
know. They are viewed as politically engaged.
They
are intellectuals. This value of the newspaper as a symbol or icon i something
like a commercial franchise, which confers worth because of its familiar
associations. Newspaper executives in the next century will either waste or
benefit from the paper-news franchise.
Second,
as an object, the newspaper imposes a daily ritual. It serves its readers in a
democracy by providing a discipline for citizenship. The newspaper landing on
the front porch or appearing in its box each day allows citizens to distribute
their duties from day to day.
Instead
of a huge task, such as getting informed about candidates before an election,
citizens can use the newspaper to spread things out, taking on information in
small doses. A daily newspaper manages to contain the entire world. Instead of
the vast array of events and personalities, readers find a selection of
highlights that make the huge world manageable. The routine of newspapers also
provides an important service by periodizing the marketplace. The grocery ads
come out on Thursday in the United States, and so shoppers can plan their
purchases during the week with time to clip the coupons and get to the store
without facing daily (or hourly) price
changes.
Contrast this to the condition of airline ticket prices, which fluctuate minute
by minute on the computer system, driving consumers into a fury.
Third,
newspapers supply a sort of social adhesive, tying people together. A common
newspaper provides topics for water-cooler talk at work. The physical object
gets carried around, clipped, filed, pinned up, and shared. When we take the
time to clip a story and send it to a friend, we are putting them first, and
the object helps us think of others' interests. The pages have all sorts of
stories jostling with each other, so that readers also have the opportunity to
confront and connect to others, many of whom they might ignore if allowed to
simply search electronically for stories that already interest them. The paper
news makes readers more cultured by putting them in touch with other cultures. Some
of these advantages may be recreated electronically, but only by imitating
paper.
Finally,
newspapers are documents of the sort that electronic files can never be. On
paper, the news fixes individual and collective memory. Pictures and stories
become portable, clipable, and fileable. We share and remember our past as
individuals, families, and societies on a backdrop of newsprint. The paper form
supplies more than bits and bites of information because clippings are
significant objects. Having your name mentioned or your photo printed in the
paper means something. Who cares if you're on the Internet? The paper not only
documents reality and gives form to common memory, it confers status. In the
study I already mentioned with Ellen Wartella, we found that young adults yearn
to become daily readers, and that those who do acquire the newspaper habit
consider themselves better informed. Newspapers are grown up and important.
The
electronic newspaper just can't do all these things. The newspaper form adds to
these benefits the many ways in which it is reused:
At my
house, we use it as a wrapper for the fish my sons catch, as gift wrap for
birthday presents, as a fly-swatter, as glass cleaner for window washing, as an
umbrella, as padding for our china when we were packing. It is recycled as
insulation and blown into the walls of our house, we burn it as kindling in the
fireplace, and we spread it out as a drop cloth for painting and other messy
work. It also has had uses in my children's art, in papier maché, collages, and
transfer prints from clay. Some people go so far as to turn it into furniture
and blankets. These creations may be trivial or bizarre, but they demonstrate
that the newspaper occupies people's minds and imaginations. That suggests its
value and importance in the culture. It is a franchise that electronic forms
have yet to reproduce.
The
next century may see the extinction of paper news, but only if
journalists
abandon it first.
References
The author wrote this piece as a visiting scholar at the University of
La Laguna, Spain, invited by Dr. De Pablos. His book 'Seeing the Newspaper'
(St. Martin's Press) won a Mellett citation for media criticism.
FORMA DE CITAR ESTE TRABAJO DE
LATINA EN BIBLIOGRAFIAS: Nombre del autor: título del
artículo, en Revista Latina de Comunicación Social número 5, de mayo de 1998;
La Laguna (Tenerife), en la siguiente URL: http://www.lazarillo.com/latina/a/97kevin1.I.htm |