NDS Newsletter Archives

I recently wrote about how the presentation of the information in either your print or web edition is a critical aspect of your reader experience with your newspaper or site.

I keep returning to the “Experience” study done by The Readership Institute in Minneapolis a few years back.

The study basically found that a different approach to the news by making it more reader-centric made the paper product more interesting by a sizable amount. This doesn’t mean you have to lower your standards of journalism, you just need to present it in a different way.

They found that you need to give people something to talk about, that you need to look out for their interests (i.e., changing how your write heads from summaries to ones that connect with the readers’ interests in the story) and that they like surprise and humor.

Nothing wrong with that. I think if we just present news the same old way, we have our heads in the sand. The times they are a changing.

I think it’d be a good idea to revisit (or see for the first time) the Minnesota studies, and here are two links that will take you to the best files:

http://www.readership.org/experience/experiencepaper.pdf
http://www.readership.org/experience/startrib_overview.pdf

I’d poke around the entire site. It holds lots of good information, including on the home page to a story that — for once — has some GOOD news about newspaper readership. (http://www.readership.org)

If you go to the Newsletter Archive (accessed through http://newsdesignschool.com/newsletter.htm), you’ll find an example of a story changed into an Alternate Story Format to show you one approach you can take to move in the readers’ direction with your content. ASFs are one easy way to do that. Please register and leave a comment!

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Also, if you haven’t officially signed up for the newsletter yet (http://newsdesignschool.com/newsletter.htm), you have missed a few. This is one last chance to get free access to the archives.

Questions? bob@newsdesignschool.com

Story

Alternate Story Format

I think the key to morphing from an ink-stained wretch to a pixel-stained one is easier than most journalists think. In some ways, it is a return to our roots. Especially with writing.

Parenthetically, let me toss in here that I know that this blog and the site are supposed to be about design, not writing. But even design is about the content; without content, there is no need for design. In fact, I believe design IS content, i.e., they are conjoined, but that’s for another post.

We have to accept the fact that most newspaper readers are time-starved. Few readers spend an hour each morning with two newspapers as I do. Then there are online sites and news on the tube. Each takes away from the time available for media consumption.

It’s not that potential readers are uninterested in news and information, it’s that they have too much to choose from. So our job is to make the newspaper easy to get, easy to access, easy and quick to read, filled with content important to them, and of course, accurate and fair, but with a dash of flair.

This is why I say we need to keep the design in mind as we conceptualize, assign and write the story, whether for the print or the web product.

Research by Poynter has shown that only a small percentage of body copy in a print newspaper gets read anyway (about 25 percent, as I recall), so why do we insist on filling pages with long columns of gray body text? Some stories are worth the space, if they are important and are good reads. But many, if not most, longer stories in your average local newspaper are much longer than they need to be.

One of my favorite quotes, attributed to Blaise Pascal, is something like: “I am sorry this letter is so long, I did not have the time to write a short one.” Newspaper journalists can often say the same thing about stories.

So even if you are writing for print, but especially on the web, aim for fewer words. Save the long stories for when you have a good one. (Here is where the design comes in….) On the web, write the story about half as long as you would have written it for print. Provide links to archived stories, if you can. Don’t make the reader scroll too much. On the other hand, don’t just take a print narrative and chop it in thirds. Instead, tell the story in three parts — think meaningful subheads — for each page. Get photos or video of anything you can.
 
Instead, think in terms of bulleted lists, pullout data, maps, graphics, ANYTHING, but six more grafs of sentences that don’t do as good a job, especially for your readers in a hurry. This is true for print, as well as the web.

Another old saying I like is: if the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem becomes a nail. If you think of yourself as a writer, the best way to present information is a story. Instead, think of your self as an interpreter of information who translates it into news, a presenter of information in a variety of visually interesting forms.

The visual display of information solves two problems: space and visual interest on the page. Actually, it solves another: making your information more valuable to your potential readers because they can get what they want in an easy to access package.

Next time, we’ll go over some examples of how to do this.

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Bob Bohle :: bob@newsdesignschool.com

It should be obvious that I believe that newspaper design is an important part of good journalism. Design is important not just for large newspapers, which are the focus of most design magazines and organizations today, it is also important for small newspapers, be they dailies or weeklies.

Newspaper design can be either simple or it can seem complicated. A large newspaper probably needs an art director and a number of artists, but they are unnecessary to get good, solid newspaper design. Even the smallest weekly can have a well-designed newspaper by following certain principles and rules.

Here is a list of what I think are the “general” basics for small newspapers (“specifics” next time):

1. Good design has to be a priority for everybody from the top to the bottom, from the publisher to the newest reporter. Good design is not an add-on to be applied at the end of the reporting process. There must be an understanding of and a commitment to the understanding that design, or the presentation of news, is an important journalistic function. It needs to be an equal partner with the gathering of and the reporting of news. Bring visual people into the planning process.

2. The basic framework of the entire publication needs to be set in stone. This means the column grid, all the typography, and where certain content will be placed. There should be a design style book sitting right next to the AP style book. There should be a plan, and it should be followed. Create templates for several basic layouts for the section fronts. This will speed up the tedious process, saving time for creative thinking.

3. The presentation of the news should be a consideration at the time of the assignment, whether it’s for a reporter or a photographer. Both writers and photographers should consider how their work will be presented as they are gathering the necessary information: reporting the story, taking the pictures.

4. Keep it simple. A good design does not have to be complicated. Stick to one or two typefaces, one or two column grids, and set up standard story and photo sizes in your InDesign templates. With a good library set up with pre-made elements, putting together a page can be quick and easy, leaving time for quality creative work on the pages that really need it.

5. Prepare a good library of free or cheap clip art, easily found and downloaded from the Web. If you make the effort to set this up ahead of time, using good descriptive tags, finding usable art, even at the last minute (which, of course, shouldn’t happen!), will be easy. In fact preparation in everything is probably the key. One can’t be creative on deadline. Two sites I like: www.cooltext.com (free) and www.graphicsfactory.com ($49 a year – and worth it!).

6. Check out other publications, and not just the ones nearby. Visit various websites, including those of large daily newspapers, and feel free to swipe good ideas. Swiping, not copying, is a time-honored design tradition. Keep a file folder of design ideas that you really like. Turn to it regularly for inspiration.

7. Read design blogs (especially pageshare.newsdesignschool.com!) and visit design-based websites. Join in the conversation, ask questions, leave comments. Especially for small newspaper staffs, having someone to talk to about design is critical. Another good place for this kind of conversation is our easy-to-join NDS Forum (forum.newsdesignschool.com.)

8. Finally, there is News Design School’s website. Learn from the many lessons (to come…), and as mentioned, carry on discussions in the Forum, and post your pages for others to comment on and post comments in general at the Pageshare/Blog. You can learn a lot from one another, and members of the NDS staff and I will join in and/or lead conversations as well. So go to our website (newsdesignschool.com) and sign up at the forum and blog. See you there!

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Bob Bohle :: bob@newsdesignschool.com

I prefer talking about improving the content of the newspaper (which goes hand-in-hand with improving your design), but in these parlous times for the industry, worrying about your content without paying attention to your readers and how they think about you may well be a mistake.

Marketing is often considered pejoratively as the “M-word.” Given the competition your newspaper has, however, spending some time on promoting and marketing your “brand” will pay off with more people interested in your paper product and more visitors to your website.

A great website for information about readers and how to get more or keep the ones you have is the Readership Institute (http://www.readership.org). Some of the following information comes from the site.

Your brand is not just the newspaper name or logo or slogan, it is more like the word/picture that people think of when they see your newspaper name. Therefore it must be positive and active. Despite what many old-school newspaper folks think, this doesn’t happen automatically when you publish a newspaper. A good product brand is created.

As always, this means understanding what is going on in the minds of your readers, discovering what they need you to deliver in terms of news and information, and then giving it to them in a way that gives them a good user experience, whether with your print or your online product.

Actually, it has ALWAYS been about that, but being essential in the lives of your readers is more important than ever today.

According to the Readership Institute, only 6 percent of local daily newspapers have a strong, positive brand with readers. My guess is that weeklies do better, but probably not by much.    

Too much time is spent on communicating a “brand” before one exists. Newspapers often jump right in with logos and slogans on t-shirts, umbrellas and coffee cups, but that is just a message, not a true branding activity.

The “brand” must start (here we go again) with the content, with the people in the newsroom and with the product and services you offer your readers. Again, the brand is not your news product(s) or even what you do with them; it is what readers think about you, how they identify you in the information marketplace.

As mentioned in the previous newsletter, if you don’t know what your readers experience when they think of you, read your paper product or visit your web site, ask! Focus groups or small surveys are easily done.

So put in some time in thinking about what you produce in terms of its relevance to your readers’ lives, their goals and their values. Talk to readers. Become essential in their lives, become a part of their lives. Create YOUR brand and personality for YOUR readers. Write out a statement of how you want to be perceived by your readers. Everyone on your staff should re-read it every day.

Getting back to newspaper design, the look and feel of your news products are certainly an important part of your branding work. The presentation must be easy-to-read first and foremost, but it also needs to be attractive and easy to navigate through. Don’t make readers work.

We’ll cover some basic design improvements in the next newsletter.

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Bob Bohle  : :  bob@newsdesignschool.com 

Check out a related post on the Pageshare/Blog.

Hundreds of millions of people access the World Wide Web every day, including more than a few in your town, but you still need to publicize your web site and make it “sticky,” i.e., make visitors want to stay. That is if you want your local audience to stop by on a regular basis.

You probably have subscribers to your paper who may not be regular visitors to your web site because they identify your news product as only the paper. You need to get them – and your non-subscribers – to think of your web site as a “must-visit” site at least several times a week. What are some ways to do this?

Following real estate guidelines, the first three rules of a good web site are content, content, content. You have to offer your visitors content that they want and need. If you don’t know, ask. Focus groups and surveys are relatively simple and cheap to put together.

Build a modern-looking and attractive site. This is easier than ever with numerous companies offering templates at reasonable prices. One example is http://www.joomlart.com, which uses the Open Source content management system Joomla (http://www.joomla.com). Clear instructions help with set-up, and it is reasonably simple to add your content each issue. Your content, a professional look. Perfect.

If it seems a little daunting, grab a local college or high school student to do it for you.

An interesting site for both free and paid web tools to make your site more interactive and fun is at http://www.poppydog.com. Some examples are a forum tool and a visitor tracker tool. You can also set up your site as a membership site, so you can restrict some content to only subscribers if you want. Poppydog has many other tools as well and is worth a serious look. For more free user fun, check out the widgets at http://www.userkit.com.

Next, your content should include blogs from your reporters, and I suggest you get a few from members of the community. In fact, while we are at it, interactivity with your readers is critical. Letters to the editor are not enough. Get your readers involved in the site with their writing and their photographs (another free tool at Poppydog). You get more content – for free – and you gain reader interest.

Other ways to gain traffic are to offer further ways for readers to interact by using polls and surveys; run contests that require site visitors to give you their e-mail address and thereby opt-in for marketing and other messages from you; and be sure to list your web address everywhere: on every page of the website, on rate cards, business cards and everything else you print (including frequently in the paper itself), and in the signature of all staff e-mails.

I hate to say it, but: if you build it – and publicize it – they will come. Often.
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Bob Bohle  : :  bob@newsdesignschool.com