Charles Apple

I’ve lauded the Virginian-Pilot many, many times for its inventive ways to surprise, delight and inform its readers. Just last week, for example, I applauded work on a metro front and for its Michael Jackson front page.

(And full disclosure, to anyone who doesn’t know: I spent four-and-a-half years running the Pilot’s news graphics operation.)

But today, I got up, fixed breakfast, opened up my morning paper and was immediately disappointed by the front of today’s edition:

Yes, that’s a Spadea advertisement, covering half of today’s front page. Not only that, but the right side of the page — the side not covered by the giant appliance ad — is graced with a vertical two-column ad for a building supply company.

You can see a one-column refer rail and part of an elaborate skybox refer above the nameplate. But for real, live editorial copy, all you can see here is one story. And only a few inches of that, even.

Here’s what the paper looks like when you open the Spadea:

Ah, now, that’s more like it.

Note how the hed on the lead story is stacked in the rightmost two columns. That suggests the A1 designer at least knew a Spadea was coming, at least. Smart move.

But does giving the reader such a tiny peek at live editorial copy help sell papers? I doubt it. But sometimes it’s not about selling papers. Sometimes, it’s about selling ads.

Denis Finley, editor of the Pilot, tells us:

Yes, this is a first.  I’m not crazy about it, but it pays the bills.  The best we could do was to get two lively topics at the top of the page to draw readers in.

Most of our single-copy papers are vended, not boxed, so prospective customers are able to peel back the spadea if they want to see the rest of the page.  It’s effective for the advertiser that’s for sure, and readers have the option of pulling it off and saving it, or discarding it.  So it goes.

It’s a first for an ad, but in fact, for several years, the Pilot ran a Spadea around A1 on holidays and at the start of every weekend, from Memorial Day to Labor Day. The Norfolk/Virginia Beach area, after all, is a resort area. The idea was to reach out to vacationers and help guide them to cool things to do, besides enjoy seafood and lay out on the beach.

The front of each Spadea was brightly illustrated with plenty of refers and tezes, with special thought given to rack presence:

Inside the Spadea was a small area map, a tip on a day-trip vacationers could take and other things to do across the region — which, by the way, consists of five large cities on this side of the James River and two more on the other side. It really is a happenin’ place, especially in the summer.

Our A1 designers always knew when the Spadeas were running and adjusted their deisign so that the lede headline would not be covered up. They’d sometimes even ditch promos or skyboxes. No sense in putting a teze above the nameplate if nobody can see it, right?

So what’s the difference, then, between running these weekly editorial-driven Spadeas — which the Pilot ran for four years, if I’m not mistaken — and the advertising Spadea that wrapped it today?

I honestly can’t tell you while I like the old Spadeas but not the new. Perhaps it’s simply the old geezer in me coming out. I readily admit, though, that if selling this ad keeps from laying off another of my former staffers or colleagues, I’m all in favor of it. Dammit.

Now, when the Chicago Tribune recently added an A1 Spadea — well, a Spadea-sized ad, anyway — it shrunk down the image of its front page and floated it into the white space to the right of the ad. “Your Full Tribune Inside,” said a big headline:

Not a perfect solution, either, admittedly. Read more about that here.

Find our recent post here about increasingly intrusive advertisements.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 2nd, 2009 at 2:28 pm and is filed under Industry woes, News design, Virginian-Pilot, Visual ethics. 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.