The long road to -30-

Disclaimer: Today’s post comes from a “perfect storm” of three different observances that have all tied together in my head. I haven’t brainstormed or written an outline or drawn a pie chart to make sense of these ideas, so I apologize if this is hard to follow, but the Internet, by definition, is non-linear, so you knew what you were getting into.

Observance #1 — Today Journal Sports Editor Casey Castle got in the mail a CD that had some of the 2007 newspaper design award winners from sports pages around the country. There were some really spectacular entries, mostly from larger papers with higher-paid designers. Here are some examples:

Great stuff; I love to see some of the best design minds out there at their finest moments. I have to say that our designer, Shane Walters, has a pretty stellar design eye himself, which is evident if you check out our front pages at the bottom of our Web site. He is able to guide a reader’s eyes from the most important story, around the page, down to the bottom, making sure the reader touches on each element at least once. It’s almost like tricking the reader into catching every story. Until you have sat down with 12 blank pages and a list of stories, photos and ads and tried to craft a readable newspaper that is not a complete train wreck aesthetically, you can’t really understand how difficult that job is. I designed at my college newspaper, The Asbury Collegian, for two years and still wasn’t any good at it.

Think of a person who has never seen a piece of sheet music in his life. That person could not tell you what a key was or name three musical notes. But if he was listening to a singer, and that singer hit a sour note, our person 99 percent of the time could point out the sour note. It’s that way with newspaper design — good design goes widely unnoticed, but bad design sticks out worse than I do at a Mr. Universe competition.

Observation #2 — Looking at great front pages made me remember one of my all-time favorite front pages. December 31 of last year, The Cincinnati Post published its final edition. A couple of guys on my blogroll, Joe Posnanski and C Trent Rosecrans, each worked at the Post at one point in their careers, and they each wrote about the final Post here and here.

The the front page of the last edition had a headline that read simply “-30-” in old-fashioned typewriter print. In the newspaper business, at the end of every story is a -30-, which means that there is no more to it. It kept editors and designers from missing a final page or running an article that hadn’t been finished. In the Post, -30- was an icon — a symbol of the end of the paper’s reign. It was a very classy goodbye to the city of Cincinnati and to the readers.

Observation #3 — We had a discussion today in the front of the office about our group of newspapers and about how costs have gone up for everything from subscriptions to rack sales to advertisements, but it seems that room in the budget for things like computer monitors and coffee has gone down. The IRS recommendation for mileage pay is 58 cents per mile, but we get 27 cents.

Mix those observations up in my head…

The newspaper business is in a rough spot. Newspapers are closing their doors, and the ones that stay open are cutting their staffs by the truckload. The world has become so fast-paced and focused on the now, now, NOW that the tangible product that you hold in your hand while sitting next to a mug of coffee or on the back porch in the afternoon is in real danger of becoming passé. Who’s to say it isn’t already?

I think of my friends, (I’m 21) and not one of them is likely to subscribe to a newspaper, at least not at this point in their lives. First of all, they are not particularly interested in the news or bills, and they all have the internet for what little news they do care about. Anything else they need to know about local stuff, well that’s what I’m here for.

Call me old fashioned, but I don’t think you get the same experience reading the news online. Here’s a step-by-step account of my online news browing:

Step 1: Go to news source Web site
Step 2: Quick scan of headlines
Step 3: Click interesting link
Step 4: Get distracted by funny YouTube video of a sneezing panda.

Not the most fulfilling information experience.

Shane, our aforementioned talented designer, wrote an excellent column April 16 defending aforementioned sports editor Casey Castle against people who claim our newspaper is biased towards West High School. While that does not have anything to do with the point I am trying to make, he did include an excellent idea about our role as journalists:

“Every week, we make an educated guess as to what stories the community will consider the most interesting, beneficial and informational. And we pick and choose photos and graphical elements to help convey those stories. That does not mean The Journal is being bias or unethical — we’re storytellers, plain and simple. Sometimes we may choose two or three photos to help tell a story. Sometimes we may only choose one. Sometimes we may use words like “beats” in a headline. Sometimes we may use words like “slays.” Regardless how newsworthy a story may or may not be to our staff or to our readers, and regardless how dominant or prominent a story may or may not be to our staff or to our readers, we strive to make The Journal’s content informative, accurate and just.”

I can’t think of a better summary of the job of a real, tangible, handheld newspaper in our virtual, online, wireless world. Newspapers use more than just words to tell stories. It’s about placement, design, headlines, photos, sidebars, columns, cutouts, teasers, the list goes on and on.

Now I understand 20 years ago, I would not have had this blog to publish my ramblings. I would not have shot a video of my interview with an Elvis impersonator or Jim Jones, blacksmith artist or used 100 of my Ichthus photos in a slideshow. The internet is a great thing for journalists — it allows us to go beyond the pages of the paper and gives us yet another medium to tell our stories. But it should never allow us to bypass the printed word.

Unfortunately, being a journalist, I am in the overwhelming minority with that opinion. It is inevitable that one day, the printed newspaper will be a thing of the past. I truly believe that all papers will, at some point, either go completely online or will just close their doors for good. I don’t think that it will happen in my lifetime, but my generation will see the greatest decline, even more obscene than it is now. Chalk it up to whatever you want to: Starbucks, gas prices or global warming, but we are approaching the end of an era in the fourth estate — the long road to -30-.

I can only hope I’m wrong.