Charles Apple

Perhaps next-day presentations of the horrific earthquake in Haiti were affected by the lateness of the hour Tuesday night. Or perhaps they were affected by the enormous cutbacks in manpower at most newspapers.

Whatever the reason, I was sorely disappointed in page-one presentations Wednesday. Disappointed enough to not bother pointing any of them out to you — except for one I found exceptionally bad.

So imagine my delight this morning — “delight” doesn’t seem like the appropriate word, given the graveness of the news, but you know what I mean — when I picked up my Virginian-Pilot to find this incredible front page:

Now, that’s what I’m talking about! The page was designed by Luis Vilches, I’m told.

And what a gutsy choice of lede art. The photo is by Jorge Cruz of the Associated Press. Denis Finley — editor of the Pilot and a former photog himself, by the way — included this note on page 6A:

A disturbing image from the earthquake in Haiti appears on the front page of the Virginian-Pilot today. We typically refrain from publishing photos of the dead, but the tragedy in Haiti is unprecedented. To sanitize the story by publishing a “safe” photograph would be an abdication of our responsibility to you. We believe this photograph captures the anguish and the toll better than any words ever could.

Better than any words ever could. And how!

The Chicago Tribune is the only other paper I could find at the Newseum today that used the same photo. It doesn’t have quite the impact that it did in the Pilot, but it’s still pretty powerful, especially above the fold:

Tribune presentation director Steve Cavendish tells us:

It wasn’t a difficult sale for the front. After deciding to play Haiti as the lede, we worked through a range of options.

Ryan Smith was the page designer and Robin Daughtridge and Steven Rosenberg were responsible for editing through all of the Haiti pictures. Ryan had seen this photo and wanted to try a bit of a different configuration (he had originally sketched a horizontal version of the page, I believe).

We were driven, in part, by several other things that we wanted to put on page one. Ryan tried this and it really worked well. The vertical was one of the best pictures we saw yesterday and  the shape let us build a dynamic page while also accomplishing some other things. We played with the crop a little bit. Ryan made the pitch to our editor and it went from there.

The Tribune’s single-copy-sales tab edition was built around a different picture, C-Dish says. He thinks the broadsheet version was better.

Tribune AME Joe Knowles says that yes, he’s received a couple of calls regarding the photo. Not surprisingly, perhaps.

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THE DAY’S VERY BEST FRONT PAGES

Not to trumpet art of dead victims or anything, but a small handful of papers made the tough choice this morning to lead with photos like this. Particularly powerful was this six-column shot across the top of today’s Miami Herald:

The emotion on the rescue worker’s face and on the faces of the crowd. Just incredible.

A bonus for the Herald: That’s not wire art. The photo was by Herald staffer Patrick Farrell. Kudos to the entire visual operation there.

Not as effective compositionally but still very stirring is this Reuters shot, used on the front of the New York Daily News:

That’s his dead little girl he’s holding. This just breaks my heart. The same photo played on page one of the Record of Hackensack, N.J.:

The New York Post, too, used a deceased victim on page one. This one shows no emotion and no faces. But it’s startling to see men standing upon concrete that, in turn, is lying across a half-buried victim.

The headline sums it up pretty well.

Photographers in Haiti captured such emotion on the faces of survivors. Here’s a wonderful choice of an Associated Press photo by the fine folks at Chicago’s RedEye:

The Advance of Staten Island, N.Y., also picked up that relief-effort theme in this moving portrait:

Note how the designer — AME Claire Regan — pushed down the size of the paper’s nameplate to help increase the impact of the lede art, by Ivanoh Demers of Montreal LaPresse and via the Associated Press.

Even more importantly, note how the Advance chose to put no stories out front today. This is essentially a big photo refer to stories inside.

Claire answered a few questions for us:

Q. What can you tell me about it? That lede photo is quite large, compared to what you normally run.

A. For me, this photo of the injured child is an icon of the Haiti tragedy. His haunting expression, his profound sadness and disorientation, summarize what is happening there. The lighting in the photo is beautiful in a disturbing way. It was a standout as I scrolled through dozens of photos on the wire. To have impact, I knew it needed to run big. I wanted it to be as close to life-size as possible.

Q. Was that a difficult sale last night? Did you work with a photo editor?

A. Yes, it was a difficult sale. We are a fiercely local newspaper, which makes it challenging to convince colleagues to devote so much A1 real estate to a non-local event — and a non-local photograph. But I’m a good salesman. My technique: Go ahead and design a few prototypes on my own, then use them for discussion. Design first, discuss later. Not everyone thinks visually. So when I show rather than tell, the doubters and nay-sayers usually come around. I know it takes courage for some editors to think out of the box.

The photo ed got involved toward the end of the process, reviewing the Haiti package with a few other eds. They validated the photo selection.

Full disclosure: I wanted to devote the whole page to the earthquake in photos and summary text, with a refer to our local reaction story. But I’m not that good as a salesman!

Q. I love the above-the-fold packaging. No story, and you didn’t need one. How did you get away with that?

A. I’m on a mission to shake up A1, to surprise readers by telling stories differently. I want readers to say: “Wow! The Advance looks different today. The Advance is telling stories differently today.” This page practices what I preach.

Summary text with photos is the perfect option for telling a 24/7 story that’s all over television and the media. It helps readers easily digest a developing story with many angles. It’s a great way to tell a complex story. I’ve proven to my colleagues that the no-story approach works in the right situation, so they trust me on it now.

The Star-Ledger of Newark — just down the road from the Advance — led with another shot from the same photo session:

Credit the Star-Ledger’s Joe Lee with that design.

The Metro papers showed what appeared to be a mother with her injured children. The look on her face shows exhaustion, shock and despair. The editors there wisely played off of this with their main headline:

Naturally, the same hed and photo was used in all three Metro daily editions. (Left to right: Boston, New York and Philly.)

Designer Stephanie Hinderer tells us:

We originally started with the popular photo used by USA Today and others. The editors felt this photo could become a classic. Although it presented some design challenges for me, I felt like it turned out in a powerful, clean presentation.

That it did, Steph.

What the page one display in the Coloradoan of Fort Collins lacks in size, it packs in emotional wallop:

The boy sits naked on what appears to be a slab of insulation or foam rubber, anxiety and fear all over his face. No one else led with this AP picture today. But it’s a good one.

The lede photo afront the News & Observer of Raleigh, N.C., was by Carolyn Cole of the Los Angeles Times:

The picture is of a teacher who was injured when his school collapsed. He’s being spoon fed by a stranger, the caption says.

N&O design director Teresa Kriegsman tells us:

Tim Myers was the designer. 1A editor is Steve Merelman. John Hansen on photo editing (we had an inside picture page, too).

How about this for over-the-fold impact?

That’s the Globe and Mail of Toronto, Canada, using a photo of a young woman covered with blood and rubble. The picture is by the AP’s Jorge Cruz — yes, the same guy who took the photo used today by the Virginian-Pilot.

We don’t know to what, exactly, the woman below is reacting. Perhaps she’s just now come across the rubble that used to be her home. Perhaps there were family members inside. Or perhaps she’s simply overcome by the enormity of it all.

Either way, the photo by Eduardo Munoz of Reuters makes for a hugely powerful page for the Orlando Sentinel:

The Sentinel’s editor of visuals, Bonita Burton, tells us:

A1 was designed by Wonetha Jackson with an assist from Nick Masuda.

We have a large Haitian population in our area, so when we realized the magnitude of the event, we expanded our coverage over our A section. We’re not a large staff, and I am tremendously proud of how the team pulled together to deliver such impact and variety in storytelling devices — all in about six hours. Design and graphics editor Todd Stewart led the effort, directing the artists and designers who made this happen.

Artists: Niko Floyd and Karen Bellville-Beaman
Designers: Wonetha Jackson, Nick Masuda, Rich Pope, Wesley Alden
Picture Editors: Akili Ramsess and Tom Burton

Click for medium-sized looks at Orlando’s inside pages:

Or, download a much larger PDF look at the whole batch here.

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THE BEST OF THE REST

You know it’s a big news day when USA Today breaks out of its usual format and runs a photo across six columns.

And it’s a great photo, too: By Thony Belizaire of Getty Images. The Observer of Charlotte, N.C., used it to similar effect:

Credit Rogelio Arando for that design.

That same photo also held up with two widely different crops. Here’s a severely horizontal use by Nuri Ducassi and Tammy Wheatley in the Sun Sentinel of Fort Lauderdale…

…and here it is in a tabloid format in the Chicago Sun-Times:

Another popular photo was this one, the third piece of lede art shot Wednesday by the Jorge Cruz of the Associated Press:

Not only is this design in the tiny Gazette of Beaufort, S.C., nice and clean and the photo large, but also the headline is just perfect for that picture. Don’t those kids look like they’re waiting for help?

I like the general design of the lede package in the Baltimore Sun, with the decks above the photo and the secondary art. It’s a shame, though, that the display is so small:

The Sun, of course, placed a lot of emphasis on its local story about opening day in the legislature. It’s hard to argue with that.

Similarly, the Detroit Free Press found itself in a crunch with local stories. Today marked the opening of an auto show — a big, big deal in Motown, of course. Plus, there was a story about the Christmas Day hijacker.

What a conjunction of stories! It might not be a very attractive page, but I’ll bet it sold well.

A number of papers used this stirring woman being pulled out of rubble. Note the blood running down the back of the man on the left:

The picture is by Lisandro Suero of Getty images. And that, of course, was the Courant of Hartford, Conn.

The Sun Herald of Biloxi, Miss., got quite a bit more mileage out of that same photo, however, by – you guessed it — running it another column larger:

The Washington Post used the same photo we showed you earlier, on the front of Toronto Globe & Mail. I’m not sure the Post often uses pictures this large:

All the descriptive headlines you’ve seen today…

• Unimaginable
• Devastation
• Heartbreak
• Misery
• Desperation
• Hell

…are put into perspective by today’s Indianapolis Star, which says this disaster may redefine what we consider a “tragedy.”

An interesting viewpoint. I’d be curious to see the death toll compared to, say, the tsunami from a few years ago.

Note the perspective we get from the wide shot of the Hatian government building. The photo is by Ricardo Arduengo of the Associated Press.

And also please consider this enormously powerful page from the San Jose Mercury News:

The vignettes are quite nice. And the lede art — of patients waiting for treatment at a stricken hospital by Damon Winter of the New York Times – is one we’ve not seen elsewhere.

That huge headline — in combination with the outstretched hand — says it all, doesn’t it?

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TWIN PAGES

I’ve written before about a phenomenon that fascinate me: How, with the zillions of choices of photos on the various photo wires, two papers with adjacent or overlapping circulation areas will chose the same damn photo and play it in a similar way.

Today, we saw this in Missouri. On the left is the Kansas City Star. On the right, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

To my eye, the Star got a little more impact out of the shot — another by the AP’s Ricardo Arduengo. Perhaps that’s because of the slightly tighter vertical crop or maybe it’s because of the condensed headline. Which do you like better?

I could ask the same question about these two large Texas papers: The Dallas Morning News (left) and the Houston Chronicle (right):

Not only did both papers play the same picture — as I noted earlier, it’s by Jorge Cruz of the Associated Press — they each ran it beneath a two-deck headline. Notice how Houston’s presentation jumps out at you more because a) the headline is bolder, and b) the photo is a full column larger. One wonders if Dallas might have been wise to drop its left-side rail today.

Both of these papers ran that same photo at a full six columns: The Richmond Times-Dispatch and the Roanoke Times, both of Virginia:

In this case, I think Roanoke’s page benefits from the white space above the lede package. But I think the Richmond headline font is much easier on the eyes. That’s the one I prefer. Again: What do you think?

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THE COMPLAINT DEPARTMENT

Now, let’s look at a few examples of what I think are less-than-stellar presentations and what made them that way.

A number of papers chose this as their lead headline:

Hey, I realize it’s a quote. But it doesn’t really say anything. Something like There’s nothing standing or There’s nothing left, it’d work a lot better. But, of course, that wasn’t the quote.

I also think the photo was poorly chosen. With all the compelling, dramatic photos available why use this one that doesn’t really show the emotion or the scope of some of the others you’ve seen here?

Likewise, I found myself startled by this page. I see “loss of life” in the headline and then I see the little girl’s eyes. Immediately, I get creeped out.

Thankfully, the little girl isn’t dead.

This is a great example of a disconnect — a poor match — between lede art and a headline.

You’ve seen a few papers today that referred to the aftermath in Haiti as “hell.”

Using that word doesn’t bother me a bit. Apparently, however, it did bother the folks at the Dispatch of Casa Grande, Ariz.:

I’d argue that hades is an exceptionally odd choice here, which detracts from the story itself. Either use hell or say to hell with it and write a different headline.

And earlier, we noted a couple of paper that might have dropped its refer roundups on a day like this.

That goes double for the San Francisco Chronicle, which ran its roundup above the nameplate:

That big batch of refers plus the story stripped below the nameplate pushes Haiti way, way down the page — to the point where it just barely peeks above the fold. Not good.

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ONLINE

Professor Nan Connolly of the University of Central Florida at Orlando points out this wonderful photo by the Washington Post’s Carol Guzy, posted on the Post’s web site:

And Northwestern University’s Matt Mansfield tweeted about stunning high-definition satellite image of Port-au-Prince, posted by MSNBC. I followed his link to find:

Sigh…

Luckily, Time magazine posted a story about Google Earth’s before-and-after satellite photos of quake-damaged areas of Haiti. Find that here.

UPDATE: Heh. Better yet, try this one here, in the trusty ol’ New York Times.

Nice job, everyone. Really nice job.

Go to the SND home page to find a nice collection of pages — including some nice non-U.S. fronts — by Dan Zedek of the Boston Globe.  Find the Newseum’s Top Ten news pages of the day here. Find In the News‘ look at today’s pages here.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 14th, 2010 at 10:21 am and is filed under A look at the day's fronts, News design, Photojournalism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.