Covering a school shooting in Huntsville, Ala.
There was big news Friday afternoon in Madison — located in the western suburbs of Huntsville, Ala. A middle school student opened fire with a handgun, shooting a 14-year-old classmate in the head.
As always, the Huntsville Times was on top of it with a compelling visual report:
This page was designed by Frank Brown, we’re told. And what’s not to like here? Let’s go down the checklist…
- A wonderful headline that would catch anyone’s interest.
- An incredible lede photo — and wonderful secondary art — by staffer Dave Dieter.
- A nice pull-out in the upper left, summarizing the story. Most readers would know the basics by this morning, of course. This summary saves boring recap at the top of the A1 stories.
- A fabulous head on the first secondary story on the left: The victim “always had a smile.”
- A page one editorial, addressing the trauma the suburb feels over the incident.
Find the Times‘ shooting coverage here and a gallery here of shooting photos from Friday.
A textbook-worthy lesson in breaking news coverage by the Times, circulation 53,190. Major kudos, once again, to editor Kevin Wendt and his team.
[Find more examples of brilliant Huntsville work here and here and here and here. Scroll down a bit on that last one.]
Hardly any pages posted at the Newseum today matched Huntsville’s work. Since I have your attention, though, I’ll show you a few more fronts.
Many, many papers led their front pages with the gigantic snowstorm striking the east coast. (We got an inch-and-a-half here in Virginia Beach, by the way — which pales in comparison to the seven inches we got last Saturday.)
My favorite Atlantic seaboard snow presentation was this one by the Baltimore Sun, circulation 186,639:
I didn’t care at all for the main headline, but the rest of the lede package is pretty solid — especially that wonderful motion-blurred snowplow picture by staff photog Jerry Jackson.
My favorite non-Atlantic seaboard snow page of the day was by the Star Press of Muncie, Ind., circulation 31,512:
The designer had the good sense to play up the wonderful photo — by staffer Kurt Hostetler — and then get the hell out of its way with liberal use of white space and absolutely no clutter at all.
Nicely done.
I was very disappointed with the day’s Super Bowl covers. I tried hard to find something extraordinary to show you. Only two front pages caught my attention.
The first was by the Journal & Courier of Lafayette, Ind., where photographer Ken Kish found these three figures — part of a public-art sculpture that stands on a street corner in Lafayette — decked out in Indianapolis Colts gear:
The Journal & Courier circulates 34,190 copies daily.
And while the page itself is a little too busy above the fold to be a sterling example of A1 design, the Daily Telegram of Temple, Texas — circulation 25,000 — also earns a big smiley-face sticker for its lede art today:
It’s not every day you see a big number spelled out with chicken wings. I feel my cholesterol going up just looking at the jpeg.
Great effort, Temple. And thanks for the laugh.