Live pages from the Baltimore Sun redesign
If you didn’t see our in-depth preview of the Baltimore Sun redesign, check here.
Monty Cook, director of content development for the Sun, passed along a big batch of live pages. You’ll find them below.
Page one, of course:
The sports front:
Redesign launch day happened to coincide with the day the Sun planned a special section on Olympic hero Michael Phelps. A local boy, by the way:
Sunday is the only day business gets its own section front. The other six days, biz will appear inside the A section:
The new Closeup section:
The new feature section kicks off with young men in towels. Hey, sex sells:
Here’s page two of features:
Travel is a Sunday-only section:
Real Estate, too, is a Sunday-only section:
Thanks for the pages, Monty! Congratulations on a successful launch!
August 25th, 2008 at 11:07 am
The pictures and graphics are beautiful. Too bad there’s supposed to be room for news, articles and text. It’s a shame that they have chosen to sacrifice precious room on the newspaper pages to show bigger pictures and columnists’ full body photos.
August 25th, 2008 at 3:05 pm
Stunning graphics….but after my 6 yo (who DIDNT PAY for the NEWS paper) is through staring at them where is the NEWS for READERS to READ?
Must be in the Examiner.
August 25th, 2008 at 4:37 pm
What? Pictures are not important? There’s not to be room for them? I agree with the full-body column mugs, but in realty — and I am seeing this in hand and not on screen — there is a lot of cramming going on. The photographs get easily taken up with items, like headlines, captions and the like, and strange boxes that eat away at their impact. Look at the inside pages and the photos get sacrificed as well.
But in the end, let’s not forget photographs, done well with impact and offering insight, are content.
August 26th, 2008 at 9:15 am
Tuesday: A mail box on the cover (who has not seen a mail box before), inside photos cropped and crammed into the news and sports pages on the inside with nary a pica to breath. This does not do anyone any good when the aesthetics and impact of a photograph, one the draws people in and gets their attention, are lost. It becomes visual noise instead of visual presence.
August 27th, 2008 at 4:10 am
Ah, newspaper photographers — the majority of them can only see life through a viewfinder. And if they were any good in the they’d be working for a magazine. Anyway, I digress.
The fact is, in newspaper journalism, it’s not their precious, I-wanna-frame-it-and-hang-it-on-a-wall photo that matters — but the overall presentation of the page.
I love text and graphics over photos. Done well, it makes for a more dynamic and compelling page that engages the reader.
In my humble little opinion, newspaper photographers need to check their ego at the door. I never knew just how intolerable the majority of them are until Photoshop brought them out of the darkroom.
August 27th, 2008 at 1:07 pm
Ninja,
It sounds like you are the one who needs to check his ego at the door.
You say the overall presentation of the pages is what matters most. You know what really matters most? The content on that page. Once you lose sight of the importance of content, you have lost all your perspective.
I am lucky to have worked with a number of talented photojournalists — and yes, they are photojournalists, not photographers — who have been some of the most design-savvy folks I have known. If the photo deserves big play, it should get big play. If it’s just another grip-and-grin, it gets the play it deserves. Again, it’s the content.
It’s statements like yours that have caused so many designers to become pariahs in their newsrooms. The page is not about you. It is not your own personal playground. Remember, it’s not your name on the masthead.
You call photographers intolerable, but with an attitude like yours its obvious that you are the one who is intolerable.
August 28th, 2008 at 12:44 pm
I posted this elsewhere, but in the event people are looking at this link rather than the one about “The Sun to launch redesign Sunday, etc.”…
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I’m curious to know what newspaper designers think of this new Sun. As a Baltimore resident and reader of the Sun for more than 20 years, I can tell you that the thought among me and my neighbors, all of whom are subscribers (for now) is this is a complete disaster. The Sun is a shell of its former self.
I gave it a few days to try and let it sink in, and granted, maybe I need to give it much longer, but for the first time since I’ve been reading morning papers as a child, I don’t even care if I see the Sun in the morning.
Granted, I’m not the hip 20something the Sun is trying (and failing) to attract with this stunt, but I am a loyal newspaper reader and could be for, god willing, another 30 or 40 years. But not if this paper keeps it up.
The full-body columnist shots are an unbelievable waste of space, this at the same time the Sun has told us they need to cut things like book reviews, horse racing results, comics, etc., and other features because of space restrictions.
The graphics are too loud and garish, and the color schemes seem to be trying to knock you over the head and say “I’m so cool! Like me!”
The front page has become worthless. Three stories instead of four, and one of them is a columnist (with full body shot, of course). You have to look long and hard for real news.
And the weather page has inexplicably gone black and white. As USA Today proved, a color weather page is one thing that, on a quick glance, gives you a ton of information. But the Sun has taken it off the back page of a section, making it much harder to find, and made it black and white, making it much harder to glean any information from it.
The most maddening, insulting thing about all of this, as a reader, is the Sun continues to pound to us that this is what the readers want. I don’t know of any readers who want less news, full body pictures of columnists, an ugly weather page, and less stuff in the paper.
Here’s the real scary thing, though, that no one is saying: I read somewhere that Tribune papers are supposed to move to a 50-50 split between stories and advertisiing. The new Sun is nowhere close to that. So I suspect after this honeymoon stage, we’ll actually see much LESS in the paper and even more ads. The readers will then leave in droves.
And to think — this whole redesign — just a few years after another redesign that involved no doubt millions of dollars — is supposed to draw readers in.
As I said, Baltimore residents and subscribers I know agree that it’s an unqualified disaster. The Examiner has never looked so good.