Redesigning Newspapers (or any media outlet)

Over at 37 Signals, there was a post about a post about an article discussing the a redesign of the Wall Street Journal, and about newspapers in general. The piece interviews Mario Garcia, a well-known newspaper designer.

Garcia makes a lot of good points, but then sort of wonders into a troublesome territory. He first starts with a sound approach to redesigning a newspaper:

"It's basically a rethinking . . . (according to) how people receive information today"

I couldn't agree more. When involved with a web redesign, more often than not, a client usually wants to put a new look on essentially the same site. It's rare that a client or business is prepared to rip up a site's roots and replant the entire thing. It's a massive undertaking, and involves a whole new set of challenges.

One of these major challenges is dealing with legacy content, old non-semantic HMTL pages. Here, an important decision needs to be made about whether to convert old content, to leave it as and focus on making all new content more accessible, or keeping the old practice of coding content in standard HTML. We stumbled upon this road block when redesigning NBA.com, and were stuck with not only having to make sure our redesign incorporated the old structure/tables, but a management decision was made to continue to produce content in that manner, and not use XHTML/CSS. For a media company that looks to distribute their content across numerous channels, this was a poor, poor decision.

I think Garcia is on point to say that you have to rethink everything. Putting a facelift on a site has a limited value if all it delivers is a new look. The entire piece focuses on newspapers, but you could easily replace "newspaper" with "websites" and it would all still be true. Such as:

"A redesign is like plastic surgery . . . it can change your nose, but not your personality," Garcia said. "My design will bring the story, the photos, the whole package to someone who gives it 10 seconds of attention and decides, I read or I don't read."

The troubling part of Garcia's view concern not just content presentation and delivery, but the content itself. He feels that in order to appeal to today's market, the Wall Street Journal should include "more celebrity news" and "more fashion and trend pieces."

More celebrity news. In the Wall Street Journal.

That's insane to me. An attitude like this perfectly illustrates the process through which our culture is being dumbed down. If more and more outlets adopt this type of editorial focus, it will just continue to homogenize the information we're exposed to. As the lines blur between papers like the NY Post, NY Times, and the WSJ, they lose the very qualities that make them unique. And if this type of content/focus is needed to stay competitive, then I suppose newspapers are on borrowed time anyway. The value of defined markets was first proved with magazines, and is now being advanced with websites and blogs. As the need for bigger audiences diminishes, content producers will focus on narrowly defined audiences. If a paper like the Wall Street Journal has to go in the complete opposite direction, and become even less focused, they might as well close up shop.

This is not to say that content presentation in newspapers can't greatly improve, I think it can. To Garcia's point, there needs to be a rethinking of the way that we as readers consume information. There is a lot to be said for making information digestible. I think that is one area that celebrity/entertainment magazines do really well. Have you ever picked up a copy of US Weekly? As someone who has little interest in celebrity news, I find myself vulnerable to being sucked in. All of their content is quick tidbits and short stories. It's easy to just flip through the magazine and get a snapshot of what is going on. A daily newspaper like WSJ could find a medium between in-depth reporting and that type of snapshot delivery. While sometimes I want more detailed information, but other times I want to 'just know what's going on.' WSJ needs to be a place where I can find either of those options as it pertains to finance. And I think a great design can create that balance.

The last quote in the article, made by Bill Gaspard, the deputy managing editor of the Las Vegas Sun, really sums up what all media will need to eventually recognize.

"The design is fine at most newspapers," said Gaspard of the Las Vegas Sun. "(But) no one is acknowledging yet that people spend 20 to 30 minutes a day with them, and we're still editing and designing this stuff as if people are spending two or three hours a day with it. Newspapers have largely been produced for the satisfaction of other journalists, and the jig is up now."

I think the same thing can be said for network television, and the model through which they create, distribute, and capitalize on their content.

But we'll save that for another post...