The day after the Alabama Media Group was announced as the new focus of the three largest newsrooms in the state, these are the stories they ran on themselves.
Papers cover themselves
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Category Archives: design
The interactive infographic
Here’s where you can yield to temptation and get yourself in trouble. The world is full of infographics of all sorts these days, but that also means the world is full of poorly designed infographics. Don’t be that designer.
Here’s a nice one in that it is obvious, clear and shares a lot of information. It has a slightly unusual presentation, but it doesn’t take long to wrap your mind around what they’re doing. (At least that was my experience.) The page is a bit long — because the graphic is long, because the information is plentiful — which could have created some layout problems, but they wisely chose to use a float technique. That, really, is perhaps the best part of the design.
Check out ProPublica’s Tangled Web and see what you think.
And while you’re at it, consider all of the reporting and data crunching that had to go into crafting a project like that.
Ch-ch-changes for … some … reason
The Associated Press fired up their Photoshop software and crafted a new logo. The story, via Poynter.
When dummy copy makes a dummy of you
The Suffolk Journal recently had a big, big problem with late-night copy that lead to very coarse language being published as a sub-head. Learn from their mistake. As in, don’t make it yourself.
Seven lessons to learn from it, including “Don’t insert jokes or vulgar statements into layouts-in-progress” are up at College Media Matters. As is the original dummy copy, coarse-language faux pas.
Did I mention the bad language? There’s a bad word.
Papers need “bolder change”
Having seen the forest for the trees — or is it the leaves from the twigs? — some former editors are chiming in on the state of an ailing industry. Melanie Sill has the story:
In a recent post to his Media, Disrupted blog, John Robinson argued that newspapers should start doing some basic things differently — from having a real person answer telephones to punching up editorial commentary — to restore their communities’ sense of ownership and trust in their local newsrooms.
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The biggest threats to newspapers aren’t just their familiar revenue problems and ever-proliferating competitors, but also the opportunity costs of failing to innovate more boldly — to be transformative, not incremental, in moving forward.
What kind of changes should we put into place? That’s always a valuable question to ask. Change, not just for change’s sake, but for improving the quality — the perception and the rapport — we present to our audience.
