A look at a few Thanksgiving front pages
For your Black Friday reading pleasure, here’s a brief roundup of interesting and notable pages from the past couple of days.
I sent out a few inquiries as to the designers of these pages. If you know who deserves credit, please e-mail me right away. I’ll update this post with names and quotes about how the pages came to be, if you can supply that.
You know the address: chuckapple [at] cox.net
—
WEDNESDAY
Nearly everyone, it seemed, led Wednesday with travel stories. Charles Gooch and his crew at the Kansas City Star played theirs better than most, cropping the lede photo to maximum effect and packaging nice pull-out info with the story below:
The design was by the Goochmeister himself. The airport photo was by staffer Tammy Ljungblad. The Star has an average daily circulation of 216,226.
The best headline of the week adorned this Wednesday front of the Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch:
Holding your giblets. What a disgusting thought. I love it.
The Dispatch circulates 183,742 papers daily.
The big talker of the week was the lede story on the front of Wednesday’s Star of Ventura, Calif. It features a mall Santa who’s worried snot-nosed little kids will give him the swine flu.
The store Santa says:
I haven’t quite decided what I’m going to do if I see a snuffy child on my lap.
Well, let me tell you something, Santy Claus. If I hear you turned away one child — just one! — I’ll come to Ventura myself and kick your fat ass back to the North Pole.
Christmas is about kids and family and giving to our fellow human beings. So suck it up, Kringle. If you’re afraid of the flu, get out of the business. Now.
Find reporter Tom Kisken’s story here. The portrait, by the way was by staffer Karen Quincy Loberg.
—
THURSDAY
Moving on to Thursday, the Kansas City Star dealt with Thanksgiving in this attractive still-live across the top but spent most of its A1 real estate on the first end-of-the-decade story we’ve seen this year:
That’s a brilliantly conceived illustration by staffer Greg Branson. Charles Gooch, again, designed the front.
Lucky Break of the Week was delivered to the Columbus Dispatch. We’d all like to get away with a big photo of a Turkey on page one for Thanksgiving Day.
Well, a local Columbus-area turkey won a national award. Making this a legit news story:
Please credit staff photographer Tom Dodge with the picture. Gobble gobble!
But why do turkeys get all the good press? Just because it’s turkey day? That’s so unfair, say pigs. Because, after all, a lot of people prefer ham on Thanksgiving.
That’s why the Des Moines Register — a 116,876-circulation daily smack in the middle of pork production central — went with a big story that addresses bioengineering and the pork industry.
That’s the most excellent Mark Marturello with the illustration and probably a big share of the design as well.
Many papers went with shopping stories, given the high hopes that this year won’t be a huge disaster for retailers. I love the headline on the front of Thursday’s Honolulu Star Bulletin, circulation 64,305:
Ka-ching indeed.
In the category of worst use of file art, we have a similar page Thursday by AM New York, circulation 266,852. The design is pretty good, actually, but…
…when I first saw this page, I did a huge double-take. See that woman on the right with an enormous shopping bag from KB Toys? Well, KB shut down in February.
If you use file art, make sure there’s nothing in it distractingly out of date. And, y’know, for a story about shopping… well, I’ve made my point.
The very best page of the Thanksgiving season is this Thursday front by the Journal of Winston-Salem, N.C., featuring a local boy — a dancer — who was selected to be part of that day’s Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York City:
The Journal’s Ken Keuffel reported that the 14-year-old kid, Ian Nelson, was to perform at the parade’s finale.
The finale — Ian said he is dedicating it to Pop Pop, his maternal grandfather — is scheduled to be presented at 11:50 a.m. The parade will start at 9. Ian said that the finale performers must arrive at the parade area by 6:45 a.m. So they will have a long wait ahead of them before they make their presentation. But even that should have some neat perks.
“We’ll be in a little heated room where we can relax with cast members of Broadway shows and Rockettes dancers,” Ian said.
It’s a wonderful story. Find it here.
And it’s a great design, featuring spot-on typography, some nice interaction between the cutout picture and the text and wonderful use of white space. Richard Boyd, the Journal’s senior editor for design and production, designed the page.
The pictures were by staffer Lauren Carroll. The Journal circulates 81,930 papers daily.
—
FRIDAY
Naturally, I went through today’s pages, as soon as they were posted by the Newseum. I didn’t see a lot that knocked my socks off.
Except for this one, by the Indianapolis Star:
Zowie! That’s a hell of a 3-D infographic by the incredible Mr. Stephen Beard.
You have to love this kind of attention to spatial detail:
Nice, nice stuff. And it’s keyed to an event downtown tonight — the reopening of a new-and-improved observation deck at the Soldiers and Sailors Monument in downtown Indy. There will be entertainment and long lines, we suspect, to see the view from the deck. And the whole thing will be televised live.
Stephen tells us:
The piece was self-reported and created in my usual blend of Lightwave, Photoshop and Illustrator. My interest in it started one day as I passed through the Circle and saw the monument closed off with chain-link and adjacent to a large crane. Natural curiosity took over, and a few phone calls later I had the idea for this piece.
The difference between this graphic and past pieces is that I did this is as a multimedia project first. After plugging in all of the reporting and 3D work necessary for that, I reverse-engineered the print piece.
It was intended for an inside Metro graphic, but the timing of the reopening with the Circle of Lights festivities pushed it to A1.
Here’s just the graphic. Click for a much, much bigger look at this masterpiece:
And kudos to the Star for pushing this out front. It’s just not that often anymore that we see huge infographics on page one.
Average daily circulation for the Indianapolis Star is 201,823.
—
I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving week. And, more importantly, I hope you all managed to sell a lot of papers and to produce some satisfying pages and graphics to stuff between all those nice, juicy ads.
The important thing to remember, though: Now, it’s time to do your patriotic duty and shop like hell.
So please e-mail me if you’d like to know what I want for Christmas…