Charles Apple

I don’t think he appreciates it when I call Chris Olds “the Best Page Two guy in the business.”

Natually, I only mean it as a compliment. At a time when many papers are struggling to find new ways of packaging content on inside sports pages, Chris mades it look easy.

What you don’t see, of course, is what Chris brings to the table. He can research, he can write, he can design.

As Chris points out later in this post, building a great sports Page Two requires mastery of Short-form journalism. Which requires great versatility on the part of a designer.

And they don’t come any more versatile than Chris Olds.

A faux-baseball card
featuring Chris Olds.
—

A desk editor for The Orlando Sentinel’s sports department, Chris edits and designs various pages, including the Sentinel’s weekly Now You Know page. He recently took on designing Varsity: The Weekly, a high school sports feature tab.

Chris has worked in Orlando for nearly two years. Previously, he was at The San Antonio Express-News and The Tuscaloosa (Ala.) News.

Chris earned an Associate degree from Northwest College in Powell, Wyo., in 1998 and graduated Cum Laude from the University of Alabama in 2000.

Chris says:

It’s kinda scary to think that 2008 will be my 10th year of working on some kind of professional copy/design desk. I don’t feel that old.

OK, maybe I do.

Chris caught my attention a couple weeks ago with a collection of extraordinary doubletrucks he designed for the Sentinel’s football preview section.

The section was a team effort, he said. But he agreed to answer a few questions about the doubletrucks, the special sections and sports page design in general:

Q. The football doubletrucks you posted a couple weeks ago are stunning. Did all eight run as actual doubletrucks? In color? How many pages do you have to have in a section to create eight doubletrucks?

A. The Sentinel’s football section is eight separate sections (with more than eight covers, if you include flip covers and zoned prep covers) and each had their own full-on color doubletrucks. 64 pages total.

Adam Shiver, who did the covers, roughed out one of the doubletrucks (carrying some of the style over from the cover) and I made adjustments from there to figure out a look, feel and format for all eight of them across the board and managed to get them all together in one cohesive (I hope) package.

My goal was to keep them simple and clean, letting the components do their job and try to make sure that they didn’t feel too busy considering the amount of stuff.

Eight doubletrucks ran in Orlando’s football preview
section. Click on the thumbnails for a larger view of each.
—

Q. Tell me a little about how these came to be. How many folks were involved? When did you begin planning them?

A. Well, a structure for the whole section is something they have had in place for some time.

Deputy Sports Editor Bill Speros and other managers routinely have rolling planning concepts, approaches and budgeting several months in advance before writers and designers get involved. For example, Don King was in Kissimmee to promote a card of his back in January and he was photographed for the cover then.

If I recall right, all of the reporters get in there, several (if not all) of the photographers and, I think, four designers worked on it.

I did the doubletrucks only, finding out that I’d be on them right before going on vacation the first week of August and then returned to work on them and some daily stuff by the time it rolled on Aug. 24. I didn’t plan a thing — my role was to take what had been generated over weeks/months, etc., and figure out how to make the doubletrucks work — play, structure, hierarchy, typography, etc.

Ultimately, we had too much stuff, so those items went on the Web. You can see all of the covers here.

If I had to bet, details and the full scope of the section’s production will be detailed over on the Associated Press Sports Editors site in the near future.

‘Save the cheerleader, save the world.’
—

Q. Did you get to supervise the photo shoot for the cheerleader page?

A. Nah, I wasn’t there. Most of the photo shoots are overseen by Speros. He’s also our king propmaster, literally wearing all kinds of hats around the office in the days before and afterwards.

If photo shoots aren’t done here, he works with photographers to set up shoots (such as Regis Philbin) on location. They’ve done this for several years now as far as I know.

Q. I’d give my left arm to have hard copies of these pages. Well, actually, I’d give Bob Voros’ left arm. But the point is: Did your readers eat this up? What kind of reaction did you get?

A. Well, I think it’s the most popular thing we do each year — and has been since well before I showed up.

PDFs of the doubletrucks can be downloaded at here, so as long as you have one of those nifty newsprint printers, you can have as many copies as you want. (No limbs necessary, though we do still have a real sword from one of the photo shoots laying around near Speros’ desk … )

Q. You told me once you disliked it when I called you “The best Page Two guy in the business.” Why?

A. I don’t know — I guess I’ve worked to build an all-around skill set — don’t want to get typecast. I laugh, but it’s true to some degree.

The secret on Page 2 is, after getting yourself to a paper that emphasizes a page 2 or a short-form alternative storytelling page, to be able to identify the facets of a topic and visualize a package, break it all down and then figure out how to pull it all back together in the most efficient (quickest) way for a reader.

It’s really a lot like generating notes or a set of questions to get the pieces needed for a story or doing an infographic.

It’s done all the time but not necessarily presented the same way — I’d say infographics often do it better and reporters often, well, do it worse when the nuts and bolts of a story get buried.

The hardest part might be finding a paper that wants to dedicate the space, resources and time to do it. Also, trusting what visual storytelling can bring to the table is necessary from the top editors down.

Page 2 means a lot of different things in different places — or on different days. Orlando’s Page 2 on Sunday is a different animal than it is on Monday or Tuesday, etc. It’s all a matter of a paper’s wants and needs. And I think it’s a lot easier for a designer/editor type to make this happen on secondary pages than section fronts, given the constraints of fronts at some papers. (Maybe that’s where your “best” idea gets a seed?)

I’ve been lucky in that San Antonio was intending to dramatically change its Page 2 just after I arrived. At first, they used unrelated “departments” on Page 2 where different types of stories or anecdotes could be rewritten, revised or reworked to fill a page. (Fantasy sports, by the numbers, etc.)

This structure had a copy editor and a designer dedicated to the page on deadline each day. By the time I had left, though, they were moving to a columnist doing something similar on a larger different topic each day, helping alleviate the deadline crunches that could happen.

I started working both sides of Page 2 with one day of the week dedicated solely to sports cards and memorabilia for about nine months (an extension of some previous work I had done in Tuscaloosa) before I went to Orlando.

Orlando also has had a similar feel for its Page 2s and some other beat/display pages that are writer/columnist driven. Similar and yet different.

Q. But what if you really ARE the best Page Two guy in the business? Is that so bad? Especially when so few papers get it right?

A. Actually, I think the skills that lend themselves to a good short-form Page 2 can be utilized quite well online — either through multimedia projects or as blogs. Same difference, really. (Or maybe I’m wrong. I dunno… ) So, as papers shrink and resources move online, you have to wonder whether non-basics like these will flourish or vanish in future newspapers. I guess it depends on what direction you think print will go.

And, really, all those big-topic standalone pages for big events like Barry Bonds’ 756 are the same thing as a Now You Know — though some of the packages tend to be predictable and repetitive — and there are many good ones produced all the time that Now You Know can’t compare to.

So that “best” crown doesn’t come close to residing in this cubicle.

Q. So, tell me about the ‘Now You Know’ feature. How often does it run? Where does it run? When did you start it?

A. Actually, I didn’t start it. It started a few months before I got here with Mr. Shiver working up the visual end with different reporters here and there depending on topic.

I ended up writing a few at first and then it evolved into a full-time deal on both sides for me. (He’s got such an all-around visual skillset that he’s in demand and more valuable elsewhere in the section.) Mine are probably slightly less infographic-oriented than his were, but I think I’ve found a niche here and there.

It’s a weekly component — Sundays on Page 2 of sports — and is pretty much a print-exclusive. The text sometimes makes it online, but that’s not real strong running by itself.

Q. Looking through your online portfolio, you seem to have an inexhaustible supply of ideas and approaches to those ideas. How does ‘Now You Know’ come to be each week?

A. Generally, I’ll have a few options for topics as Now You Know possibilities each week, different ideas that sprung up over time here and there. I prefer to react to news, too — that makes it more challenging but sometimes logistics don’t make that possible.

I still have a few topics I have punted around for months. Reacting to what’s going on makes what seems inexhaustable a bit easier, actually.

Then you just have to know how to scrounge around for resources.

Some are based on numbers or sets of facts:

Other pages just come up on a whim — like when I noticed quite a few noses in the news:

I found the May 12 photo while searching for a baseball roundup photo and then a few others showed up along the way. Combine that with a simple “department” item (a quiz) down the side and it filled up fast.

A similar start on this one, searching through photos:

In terms of a routine, I typically have one day each week (or part of a day) to sit down and research/write/design it. Some weeks, some topics take less time, while others take more. Some weeks where I know I will have less time to work on it. I will try something like On further review, which is less research-driven.

I think the real challenge is to figure out different ways of presenting topics, not so much finding them. This one took more time than some because of that, yet the info is out there, readily available:

And, well, sometimes they evolve on that day. This went from an anecdotal (and more) package to a numbers package — with a number-oriented photo — since I had real problems boiling down Richard Petty’s storied career.

You know I was struggling when I threw in this:

77-1-11-0
The four-color CMYK mix that makes the famous Petty Blue that adorned all his cars. For you non-print geeks, that’s the percentage of cyan, magenta, yellow and black respectively.

There weren’t any groans from editors. In fact, it got one of those famous Speros cackles (one that gets emulated throughout the department when he’s not there — oops, that secret is now out … ) when I showed it to him.

And I’m probably the most conservative designer of the bunch, so some of what I think is the oddest stuff goes through pretty easily.

Q. What was your favorite “Now You Know” page?

A. I don’t think I have a favorite. There are ones with endearing parts, but not 100 percent solid. There are ones that are good, but not perfect.

I do think I had a good run last summer — I entered a few as SND entries — but that didn’t turn out like I had hoped.

But our Winter Olympics coverage, which also was short-form driven, was a surprise:

Of recent ones, I liked these:

…though neither are perfect.

Cliché answer warning: Hopefully my favorite is yet to come?

Q. You used to write a baseball card column in San Antonio, right? I see you still work baseball cards into “Now You Know,” from time to time. Do you miss the column?

A. Actually, I used to write a weekly sports card and memorabilia column in Tuscaloosa before transitioning that topic into short-form on Page 2 in San Antonio. It ran from 2001-2003 and was distributed to all of the New York Times Regional Newspapers. Not sure if any ever ran it, but …

After about a year, it evolved into filling a whole page called SportStuff with a column and a few departments.

It was fun running around a NASCAR track asking Nextel Cup drivers whether they collect their toy cars and watching college kids play with their own bobbleheads.

But I don’t miss having to write longer pieces, compared to writing short-form, that’s for sure. I miss it to an extent, but the topic is one that I won’t ever be away from.

I started collecting baseball cards in 1987 and, ironically, it was a related essay in a vocab/grammar class in high school that prompted the teacher to recommend me for the newspaper staff. That was 1994.

Otherwise, I’d probably be an architect right now — that’s what I was really, really into in all of high school and at first in college. (The precision drawing skills still come in handy to this day — I’m not one of those designers who just eyeballs things … )

Ironically, I’ve had some discussions about possibly doing a blog on cards and memorabilia for OrlandoSentinel.com, but that’s all still in early stages.

Q. You’re a hell of a writer. What’s your background? Did you work as a reporter before you got into the visual side?

A. Well, at “professional” papers, I’ve really only worked in a columnist role in sports. But when I was at Northwest, I was editor for two years after working as sports editor my freshman year — that involved everything. Writing straight (hard) news, features, sports, editorial page editorials, columns, you name it, while also editing plenty and putting it all together.

I took it all very seriously — it was a six-day-a-week job.

My freshman year was the typical “college paper” experience and I did some stringing and had a small internship, but it suddenly got very real very fast after that when a student was murdered and all kinds of other unprecedented stuff took place in a very small town. Rather than detail it all, here’s a link from my portfolio.

I hate to dwell on stuff that’s so dated, but those are the formative years in many ways, so to speak.

I had a chance to take a full-ride to the University of Wyoming after that — where I might have been in the midst of the Matthew Shepard story that fall — but instead I opted for Alabama, where my NWC journalism professor, Michael Prince, was from and went to school.

After that, did about a year’s worth of magazine features on UA sports for one magazine and I worked in Tuscaloosa on the copy editing/design desk (Feb. 1999 on), literally producing every page possible in the newspaper except for pages in the sports section.

In fall 2000, I was chosen to be managing editor of a TNews startup tab focusing on University of Alabama sports, but it was scrapped before the first issue when the newspaper changed its publisher. (There’s a lengthy exclusive and untranscribed Mike DuBose interview on tape somewhere around here … )

I moved into sports when the newspaper designed in 2001. There I’d often put out a section by myself — that’s a challenge — and I did many, many big-game fronts and packages, one winning an SND:

The rest, they say, is history. (Damn, another cliché.)

Q. Bob and I regularly look at your portfolio for inspiration. Whose work do you watch?

A. Inspiration? Ha!

Honestly, I haven’t been keeping up with too many different newspapers as much as I used to since I don’t have to go through the crunch of fronts on a regular basis, but trying to keep fresh with Now You Know, which is more challenging, has had me looking in some typical and some not-so-typical places.

– GOOD Magazine is great, though I’m not as political as its target audience.

– Believe it or not, and I will probably take some grief for this one, but WWE Magazine took on a short-form and visually driven approach to its content about a year-ago and it hooked me. (Its previous version was windy, unreadable juvenile stuff. Now it’s perfectly readable juvenile stuff. … I subscribed!)

– As Tim Harrower has mentioned in past presentations, magazines like Maxim and FHM are great for short-form content, but as those publications have changed and evolved, I have examined them less. And they seem to be dying as fast — or faster — than papers.

– National Geographic often has some great single-page packages — for example, one comparing the typical elementary school lunch here vs. other countries by photograph and nutritional value as an infographic.

– Sports Illustrated’s SI Players section is great, too.

– British music magazines Q and Mojo do some cool stuff and Total Film had me for awhile, too.

Newspaper-wise, the newish Page 2’s in Lauderdale and St. Pete are interesting, but I don’t follow them all that regularly even though I probably could. I saw a copy of The Plain Dealer during a trip north and was impressed on 1A and elsewhere — that doesn’t always happen with the really good ones on your typical weekdays.

The Virginian-Pilot, of course, always brings A Game with big news. And other papers who have taken on more modern newspaper designs — K.C., St. Louis, Excelsior, Lauderdale — are worth watching as are Boston, Baltimore and San Jose when big news, such as Barry Bonds’ 756, arrives. (Those are easy picks, though.)

And I’m not a broadsheet snob — the Rocky Mountain News and Link are great, too.

Find Chris Olds’ own VizEds blog here.

Find Chris Olds’ online portfolio here.

Thanks so much for the great interview, Chris. Best wishes!

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 19th, 2007 at 7:20 am and is filed under News design, Newspapers, Visual Editors, VizEds Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.