Charles Apple

Last year, we sang the praises of the tiny Victoria Advocate — a 33,000-daily in Victoria, Texas, midway between Houston, San Antonio and Corpus Christi — that went all-out during summer movie season, turning its weekly entertainment tab, M3, into a talker by blowing out each week’s movie release on the cover and throughout the edition.

It was cool stuff and it sold a lot of papers, they told us.

This year, as you know, we simply haven’t seen the kind of week-after-week blockbuster lineup out of Hollywood that we enjoyed last year. The Advocate played catch-up today, however, by turning its M3 section into a broadsheet replica of the newspaper seen in the Harry Potter movies:

Advocate creative director Ryan Huddle tells us:

Aprill [Brandon, the reporter assigned to M3] and I were talking about 2 weeks ago how cool it would be if we could do an entire issue of the Victoria Prophet instead of just the single pages like we did a few years ago. We took the idea to the editor and he loved it he even let us turn the normal tab section into a broadsheet so we could make it as close to the real thing as we could.

Ryan was kind enough to send us the entire section, which inserted today.

Pages two and three contain a lot of the normal furniture run in M3 each week… reformatted, of course, to match this week’s Potter theme. We won’t dwell on them here, but you can click each for a much larger view:

The real meat of the Potter stuff begins on the center spread, pages four and five.

Ryan writes:

My team on the Harry Potter edition was insanely small — it was only two copy editors, Meredith Cash and Shari Prenzler. Aprill wrote a big chunk of the stories and spent the last two days building the ads making some them up. She only took time out to go to the midnight showing of the movie.

It’s not so surprising Ryan and Aprill work well together, perhaps. He tells me they’re engaged!

You’re seeing lots of design gimmicks here — a mix of headline fonts, elaborate drop-caps, a parchment feel for the background, yet color cut-out photos. All those are characteristics of the newspaper in the movies.

In fact, remember how the photos in the movie actually move? Ryan achieves that effect with the truck dealer ad across the top of the page:

Yes, it bothers us a bit that you have an advertisement — that truck ad, specifically — mixed together with locally-generated content and studio handout or wire material, all using the same styles and typefaces. We felt especially strongly about this beer ad, running down the left side of page six…

…until we realized it was a fake ad — Butterbeer appears in the Potter movies. The address given for the pub in the ad eventually tipped us off.

The fake ad essentially is editorial content, as sure as it was in Mad or National Lampoon magazines. The doubletruck truck ad, though, was advertising material.

The line between ads and editorial blurs even more. But the funny thing is that, in this context, it all works.

Interestingly, the real beer garden ad — Lu Raq’s, on the lower right of the page above — chose not to go along with the Harry Potter theme.

Ryan writes:

Once we had the idea, I went to the department heads in the office to see if they would like to try this and have some fun or at least try something I have never seen anyone do before. I am lucky in that Chris Cobler (Editor), Dan Easton (Vice President), and Brenda Miller-Ferguson (General Manager) let me do things like this and try new things out.

They even let me spiral the text on one of the stories. I love this issue.

Ryan writes:

The hardest part of was making the stuff up like on the weather page, Classifieds and the rest of the little hidden items scattered throughout the publication.

The eight-page section inserted today. Here’s how the Advocate promoted it on the front — a strip across the top, plus a blurb in the bottom right of the lede package:

Last year, Ryan and his team impressed hell out of us with their series of M3 editions, going all-out with elaborate color illustrations and presentations throughout the tabs. This was a big marketing hit for the Advocate last year.

Here are a few of last summer’s covers. The top two — Iron Man and Indiana Jones — were wrap-around covers. Click any for a larger look:

Go here to find our Q&A with Ryan about last summer’s M3 movie editions .

This entry was posted on Friday, July 17th, 2009 at 11:41 am and is filed under Illustration, Innovative ideas, News design, Victoria Advocate. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.