Charles Apple

Folks up north might be laughing at the panic recent snowfalls have caused down here in the not-so-damn-sunny-these-days South. But fact is, we’re simply not equipped to deal with snow. We get snow so infrequently that we’ve not made the investment in snow plows, salt trucks… or, for that matter, snow shovels and blowers for our sidewalks and driveways.

So, yeah: When we get snow, it’s a mess.

And where there’s a mess, there’s a talker. And a damn good story for newspapers along the Atlantic coast.

We’ll begin today with the best — and, coincidentally, one that wasn’t posted at the Newseum today. Meaning we might have a minor exclusive here. (Yay, us!)

Justin Ferrell, news design director of the Washington Post, was kind enough to send along the Post’s excellent front page today (click for a larger view):

You’ve heard it before, but here it is again: If you have a brilliant photo like this, play it big and get the hell out of its way. The photo is by Katherine Frey. Justin tells us this design was by:

Tan Ly with help from Dennis Brack.

Running it six columns wide maximizes its impact. And the nice horizontal set of bar charts across the bottom sets the whole thing off nicely, with the data everyone wants to see.

Even more brilliant — if that’s even possible — was the inside page by, Justin says:

Patterson Clark, also with help from Denny Brack and Larry Nista.

(Again, click for a larger view…)

Oh, wow. Putting this snowstorm into historical perspective — with great little pullouts on each storm — is interesting enough to send the history geek in me into conniptions. But this… this, my friend, is absolute brilliance:

Oh, man. I can see it now. Bill O’Reilly will be holding this page up on Fox News and blaming President Obama for paralyzing the capital.

This stuff is simply too good to look at via low-rez jpeg, folks. Please download the PDFs. Go on. I insist:

• Find the Post’s front page PDF here.
• Find the inside page PDF — including that incredible graphic — here.

Average daily circulation for the Washington Post is 582,844.

A number of other papers also produced notable front pages today. Let’s take a quick spin through them…

Not quite as good as the Post today but still really damn good and clean and crisp was the Baltimore Sun, circulation 186,639:

The Sun, too, used its best art — by Karl Merton — huge to great effect.

The Sunday Capital of Annapolis also went with a huge hed, bullet points across the top and a huge photo by staffer Paul Gillispie:

The Capital circulates 42,825 papers daily.

You’re seeing a lot of “digging” themes in the headlines, not surprisingly. Here’s the Daily Times of Salisbury, Md. — circulation 24,157 over on the Eastern Shore — where the headlines weren’t so big but you do get a nice John Deere tractor:

The photo is by staffer Joey Gardner.

I also like the rail down the right side: Sure, you’re snowed in. But at least the big game’s on tonight. Heh…

The Carroll County Times of Westminster, Md., isn’t just digging out today. They’re crippled:

The photo is by staffer Dave Munch. Average daily circulation for the Times is 24,623.

I dunno. We talked, a few weeks ago, about disconnects between headlines and photos. You shouldn’t show a guy walking down a snowy street with a headline that mentions “crippled.” Perhaps something showing stuck cars or traffic issues might have been a better choice.

Something, perhaps, like you see on the front of today’s News of Lima, Ohio, circulation 32,860:

The photo by Jay Sowers adds an immediacy to the page that some of these others lack.

And down in Richmond, the storm was a record setter:

Credit staffer Eva Russo with the nice picture of a huge tractor dumping snow as if it were nuclear waste. Which it might as well be, for all we Southerners know about it. The Times-Dispatch circulates 133,161 copies daily.

And from digging out on a macro scale to digging out on a micro scale, here’s the Free Lance-Star of Fredericksburg, Va., circulation 46,672:

Yet another nice headline, a clean layout and a nice photo — this one, by Mike Morones.

It’s amusing, really, to flip through the Newseum and check out just the headlines.

Atlantic City calls this the Blizzard of 2010:

The Washington Examiner says it was a Monster Storm:

Two Pennsylvania papers — the Post-Gazette of Pittsburgh and the Tribune-Democrat of Johnstown — went with Snowmageddon…

…while a number of papers were forced to break out their exclamation marks:

As you shuffle though all these fronts, notice that the most effective presentations all have certain things in common:

• They used huge, bold headlines.
• They picked powerful art to visually tell the story.
• They used pullout info to summarize the damage or tips on dealing with the aftermath.
• And the very best ones used white space and resisted the urge to clutter the page with too many other stories or doo-dads. Which was hard to do today, given that everyone wanted to plug their Super Bowl stories out front.

Here’s a nicely-presented example from the News Journal of Wilmington, Del., circulation 91,962:

That’s a story count of two. Appropriate for a day like today. That’s also a great photo by staffer William Bretzger, as well as an enormously entertaining piece of secondary art showing snow collecting atop a statue, turning it into a conehead:

Some of the headlines you’re seeing here today are pretty decent. Some of them seem a little laughable. Your make the call.

I did laugh at the optimism shown today by the Daily Progress of Charlottesville, Va., circulation 28,697. It was bad, the paper said, but at least they didn’t get more snow:

Yep. That’s one way to look at it. I’ll bet all those folks shivering with no power today are really into the glass-half-full thing.

And my favorite Headline of the Day is this one, afront the Vindicator of Youngstown, Ohio, circulaiton 56,412:

Groovy, baby. Groovy.

And just to show you that every rule has an exception, check out the giant headline on the A1 snow story in today’s Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch, circulation 183,742:

That’s right. No big hed at all. Instead, the Dispatch ran a By-the-Numbers piece.

Definitely not what I would have recommended. But they made it work.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 7th, 2010 at 2:57 pm and is filed under A look at the day's fronts, Graphics, News design, Photojournalism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.