The BIG question for SND: How do we stop companies from thinking of us as ‘production’?
After posting my big piece last Wednesday on what really happened with the Society for News Design, a number of events have transpired.
1. The society finally posted its official, detailed timeline of the events that led to the resignation of SND president Matt Mansfield.
2. Discussion in the comments field of the timeline post and the earlier, disastrous live chat thread has grown even more contentious. Which I wouldn’t have thought it could get even nastier.
3. Discussion around the internet has continued to speculate about what else needs to be done to fix the society. Josh Crutchmer, for example, appears as if he’s calling for the resignation of vice president Bonita Burton. And Desiree Perry of the St. Petersburg Times has proposed a number of alternatives for folks who choose to leave the society and would like to join another organization instead.
Through all though, I keep looking for a voice of reason. What is it that we in the industry ought to be focusing on? Other than the nebulous “let’s move on.”
I finally found that voice. It’s from Dean Lockwood of the San Antonio Express-News. He posted the following in the forums of VizEds Sunday and invited me to join the discussion or to amplify. I’m choosing to “retweet” the entire piece.
Dean writes:
Trying to focus a bit a thought I’d rambled on about in one of the (many) SND threads.
One of the realities we are facing in the industry is that the “production” act of copy editing and building pages is being either outsourced or consolidated in chain’s hubs. I don’t agree with it and it’s not going to happen everywhere but there is clearly a bean-counter’s momentum to this that I doubt is going to be stopped by any arguments we make about story development and so on.
So let’s assume that’s the way it has to go down, to some degree or other.
Most any designer will agree there are large hunks of the job that are the simple, mechanical processing of pages. Some of these pages could be templated, automated or built by much lower paid beings. It’s the other part of real design I want to focus on.
Designers and copy editors (hey, we’d best unite cuz we’re in the same leaky boat, kids) tend to be the ones with the expertise to organize information, augment what the reporter and line editor have turned in and turn it into a true informational package. (And it is no different on the web — except at most newspaper sites there is no one even bothering to mess with that.)
So here’s a challenge for SND, VizEds or anyone who gives a hang about what we do professionally:
- How can we and to what degree can we separate the functions of design production from the functions of information development (print or online)?
- In environments where design production is off-sited, how do you staff those information developers, and how do they coordinate with both the content generators and the production people?
- How do we, ourselves, figure out this transition from being a primarily visually focused craft to information specialists? (Yes, there is room for designers to transition to multimedia, video, Flash, mashups and the like. But there is only going to be so much capacity for that an organization is going to be willing to pay for. And more and more, a lot of that stuff is going to become automated in a way that non-specialists can do to a degree that will satisfy the bosses).
- Most importantly: How do you convince newspaper executives to make this transition? How do you explain it, justify it, prove the profit-and-loss still works out?
To me, this is The Big Question.
And a damn good question it is, Dean.
Comments, anybody?
June 22nd, 2009 at 11:32 pm
Hi Chuck,
I just read this on your site:
“Most importantly: How do you convince newspaper executives to make this transition? How do you explain it, justify it, prove the profit-and-loss still works out?
To me, this is The Big Question.”
Sorry, Charlie, but it ain’t gonna happen. It’s impossible to convince publishers that designers add to the bottom line - because they don’t.
Dean Lockwood is living in a fantasy world.
Henceforth, all newsroom personnel will be making less, as a result of furloughs and wage concessions. For papers that are cutting, designers will be the first to go.
I’m not advocating the elimination of designers, but it seems inevitable. The sooner everyone faces reality, the better.
And here’s what you’re missing on the SND story - Matt was leading the charge to refocus SND on the future - which is online. Bonita & Co. still want to focus on awards for print pages. Her crew doesn’t want to make the leap across the digital divide to online. Matt couldn’t get the Luddites to embrace the future, so he bailed.
I don’t blame him.
In contrast, newspapers keep hiring my company because our design work DOES produce a return on investment - even if it doesn’t generate any SND awards.
My redesign in Wilson, NC produced $200,000 in new revenue and doubled the rate of subscription starts, proving that you can boost readership and revenue simultaneously.
I’m not making this stuff up: See story from E&P: http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003981365
I’m working on a redesign in Bakersfield right now, which will debut in August. We project that it will cut costs and boost revenue simultaneously, with very little of what any SNDer would call “design.”
If you think Bako’s last redesign was radical, you’ll be shocked by this one. It’s a classic example of “design for the bottom line” which is what the industry needs right now.
In contrast, look at former SND President Lucie Lacava’s redesign of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. It’s losing $1 million per week, and readers hate it. Read and hear all about it here, from NPR:
http://www.publicbroadcasting.net/wabe/news.newsmain?action=article&ARTICLE_ID=1503268§ionID=2866
And what is the AJC’s response to readers who hate their redesign? They changed the shade of green they use in sports. I’m not making this stuff up. Just read the transcript of the NPR broadcast. To wit:
“AJC editor Julia Wallace says the re-design is a working model. Already, there have been changes. The sports page has a new green.”
June 23rd, 2009 at 8:05 am
If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a million times: Dean Lockwood is smart.
June 23rd, 2009 at 9:46 am
I’ll retweet my response to Lockwood’s post, too:
I don’t believe you convince newspaper execs, publishers or editors of anything. I think if you have a better way of doing things, you start your own publication or Web site or what-have-you and prove it in the marketplace. If you’re waiting for today’s newsroom leaders to get excited about what designers and copy editors can bring to the table, you’ve already lost the battle.
What you need is not a proposal for the company bigwigs, but a business plan for investors.
The newspaper chain owners have driven the bus into the weeds. I have no faith whatsoever in them.
June 23rd, 2009 at 10:06 am
True dat.
June 23rd, 2009 at 10:16 am
Alan:
Read my post before brushing me off to Fantasy Island. I am very much talking about a transition of designers (as we and publishers currently know and think of them) to Something Else.
Do I know exactly what that Something Else is? Hell no. And I imagine neither do Matt Mansfield, Charles Apple nor you. It invariably involves a new focus online. And it’s certainly something we ought to be discussing in terms of professional development (even as we anxiously try to figure out industry development).
For all your (legitimate) innovation and (impressive if not terribly widespread) success, you my friend are not in possession of The Secret Sauce. If the revenue and subscription and readership numbers at the papers you cite continue to increase two years after your check has been cashed, THAT will be something to plug.
June 23rd, 2009 at 7:09 pm
Zing!
June 23rd, 2009 at 11:02 pm
Here’s the main point: Screw newspaper companies. You don’t need ‘em.
Figure out how to DO IT YOURSELF. But be willing to put in the work for the DIY to make it useful.
And be sure to tell your friends how you made money doing it. (Or if you are.)
June 24th, 2009 at 8:36 am
Um, Ernie.
Do you have a mortgage or any kids in college at this particular moment?
:)
June 24th, 2009 at 9:56 am
I click on this link to read/join in a lucid, rational discussion about the future of this industry (not to mention my future in it), and what do I get? An Alan Jacobson commercial that helps no one but Alan.
To me, Dean’s greater point is that SOMEONE has to stand up and be an advocate for those of us who still work in a newsroom. If SND either can’t or won’t, then we have look somewhere else to be our greater voice. The greater point of the greater point is that this thing isn’t just about designers. It’s about the future of the entire industry.
If designers are now to be the first to go, it’s because 1) there’s no one left to cut and 2) there isn’t nearly as much information for us to organize because the stories are considerably weaker because all the really good reporters have been cut because they were around long enough to get really good and, because they were around enough, made too much money to suit the suits, if you will.
What the beancounters haven’t realized is that you can’t cut your way to profitability. They’ve been trying it for years now, and it hasn’t worked. As a matter of fact, it’s made things worse all the way around.The ones who are left behind are reduced to a level not too far above slave labor where wages (which are low to begin with) are slashed and unpaid time off mandated on a whim. Slash and burn isn’t working. All they’re doing is further deteriorating the product, which leads to more reader dissatisfaction and more money loss.
I’m tired of everyone circling the wagons and waging a war of attrition that has no winners. It’s time for someone to go on the offensive and find something that works because what we’ve been doing sure as hell isn’t. Who’s going to be the first to break the trend and actually start investing in its product and working like hell to turn the thing around instead of trying to put a Band-Aid on a hemorrhage? Consider that a challenge, folks.
Just my .02.
June 24th, 2009 at 12:31 pm
Dean,
You can do both DIY and newspaper jobs. It’s a great way to get your name out there outside of “the man” owning your work.
The other day, Paul Morgan spoke of doing exactly this. Now he has a career outside of newspapers that pays him good money.
http://www.visualeditors.com/apple/2009/06/so-what-really-happened-with-snd/#comment-31389
That’s all I’m saying you do.
It’s called contingency, man. :)
June 24th, 2009 at 1:15 pm
That’s why I’d like to see SND move into the incubation business. It’s people like Ernie — who’s doing Short Form Blog on his own in addition to his full-time job — who could use the support.
Treble that need for folks like me who’re “lucky” enough to have a mortgage :-D Let alone, kids, student loans, etc.
I know it sounds a little wacky. But who else is going to do it? Who else believes that designers have good ideas about news and information? No one, that’s who. Not the newspaper owners, obviously.
Imagine if the award you got for your awesome project wasn’t just a piece of vellum and a reproduction in the 31st annual, but a stipend, or a guarantee of clerical support, or marketing help.
Would it be difficult? Gods, yes. You’d need an executive director who was tied into venture capital and angel investors, and s/he wouldn’t be cheap. I have no idea what the implications would be for tax status, let alone bylaws. And it’s just plain not easy to get money for anything media-oriented these days; everyone’s scared poopless.
But that’s the sort of SND I’d cheerfully send my $110 to each year, even though I’m out of the business and absolutely cannot afford it. And that’s the sort of contest I’d bust my butt to enter.
June 24th, 2009 at 1:24 pm
Hey, um, Dean (a very smart guy with smart answers):
Downsizing newspaper companies don’t care whether you have a mortgage or a kid or kid(s) in college. At some point, the risk and pain of staying has to be measured against the risk and pain of jumping into the unknown.
The hard part: Each one of us gets to decide where that point is. Or the companies do.
June 24th, 2009 at 5:52 pm
All these are valid points (and believe me, I’m not here to defend the joker who got us here).
Entrepreneurship is good. Exit strategies are good. Even so, I would hazard a guess that the majority of folks who continue to participate in this site or as members of SND likely will be people who work at these traditional media companies (even more so at the international level). As screwed up and loathed as they may be, they probably are not (in one form or another) going away.
There may indeed come a time to bail. There may come a time where they just send all the friggin’ designers home, in one worldwide memo. But till then, how do reposition, transition?
And, heck, let’s be for real: Whether “production design” gets the shaft or not, companies today, tomorrow and forever will still be hiring companies like Alan’s, Mario Garcia’s or Roger Black’s to re-imagine, reinvent, launch new ventures and so on.
It’s no like the day is coming when There Is No Design. (Though that would be a bitchin’/scary cable show: “After Designers”)
June 26th, 2009 at 6:54 am
Folks, remember that what pains the newspaper industry today also pains all forms of print, from periodicals to books to posters to billboards.
The way we communicate, one-to-one, one-to-friends, one-to-many and many-to-many, changes by the minute. Since print changes, um, by the decade, people find other, more efficient ways to do things they used to do in print.
Say what you will about tactile quality, well-understood interface, browsability, portability, or readability. Print forms may retain advantages there but in more and more cases they do not overcome digital advantages: instantaneous availability without boundaries, at much lower cost per unit of information communicated.
So the nut graf of this conversation becomes:
Information architects will see high and increasing demand in coming years for their skills and experience. Graphic artists focused on print will see gradually decreasing demand in coming years for their skills and experience.
Given that newspapers are leading the slide down the print crater, graphic artists who do not transition to information architecture might be able to climb back up into another print specialty for a while, but will never return to the glory days where we actually felt we were changing newsroom cultures and winning new readers.
So what is an “information architect”?
In my view, it is someone who thinks of the digital world in three distinct demand camps, with overlaps: communication, entertainment, and information. We play mostly in the information space, which, unfortunately, is the least engaging on average of the three camps.
Don’t believe me? Think about how much time people you know (NOT you, because you’re in the news business and that makes you an outlier) spend sending text messages, ordering products, or watching online video vs. actually reading news articles.
So an information architect starts by knowing the difference. Her specialty is optimizing information to be communicated in its best, most efficient form for the broadest possible recipient set. But she does not stop there. She also knows how to engage people in conversations, and form communities, around specific types of information.
In that specialty, the graphic arts have a role, but it is just a small share of defining an overall user experience. A few former print designers I know have made this leap successfully. Others become frustrated at how much left-brain stuff is required, and how little time they spend exercising the right brain.
I know this for sure: Newspaper executives (at least in the United States, at ground zero of the business crisis) are in no mood these days to think of visual journalism as a savior. You get attention only when called on to help save money; for example, a redesign to fit narrower webs. The rest of the time, yeah, nice looking page, Jack, but ad revenue and circulation just fell double-digits again, so, like, cut some more costs … oh, gotta run.
Say what you will about Alan. His redesign projects start and finish with return on investment in mind. That’s how he gets executives to listen, and those of you trying to inspire change from the design desk outward would be well advised to observe and learn.
Please don’t get me wrong. Print will not die for many years, if ever. But staking your success on print alone resembles trying to climb to the top of a mountain that slowly sinks into the earth. Less and less room at the top, more casualties at the bottom. Newspaper people happen to be on the least stable ground.
I believe much of the consternation around SND these days just reflects the frustration and vulnerability we all feel trying to ride the mountain. I would love to help, but I can’t do much if the conversation stays focused on “making graphic design important again in the newsroom,” a futile mission I infer from this and other conversations.
Thanks for reading.
–jay