How to squeeze the life out of your newspaper

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Tuesday, 15 April 2008

How to squeeze the life out of your newspaper

A recent post by Clark Humphrey recalled this 2003 essay in Times Of London.

From the Anchorage Daily News (Alaska) to the Key West Citizen (Florida), almost every paper in the country is designed to precisely the same template: a broadsheet with lengthy headlines and five main sections: news, local news, business, sport, and entertainment, which will be given a fancy name like Style or Life or Express or Go! This will contain the Dear Abby agony column and the syndicated strip cartoons. There will be extra one-day-a-week sections — Cars, Property, maybe Food and Health. Corporate and flavourless, they are without any sense of idiosyncrasy, eccentricity or risk.

The great papers are more varied but equally grey and dull. Front-page stories are always continued on an obscure inside page, so that reading a paper on a crowded train is a gymnastic exercise. They are nearly always overwritten, from the unwieldy portmanteau intros onward. The design and picture editing would have been passé on an English provincial newspaper of the early 1970s. The use of colour is pathetic. The headlines, almost universally, are turgid. As The New York Times said, over three columns, of Bush’s State of the Union address:

Calling Iraq a Serious Threat, Bush Vows That He’ll Disarm It and Also Rebuild US Economy

(And that’s the country’s best newspaper. You should see the bad ones.)

As Clark argues:

The typical newspaper’s particular package of information, entertainment, and infotainment wasn’t some eternal set-in-stone formula, but grew over decades of industry practice. Why should there be only one paper in most towns? Why should everyone have to get a sports section? Why do those sports sections cover a few big spectator sports in minutae, but ignore most participant sports?

It may hurt in the short term, but there are other models of journalism.