Charles Apple

The Savannah Morning News — a 47,700-circulation daily owned by Morris Communications of Augusta, Ga. — was all over President Barack Obama’s visit to their city Tuesday.

Click for a larger view:

You’re looking at a photo of the president wisecracking about his cholesterol levels while dishing out mashed potatoes — with fried chicken, rice and iced tea nearby — at a well-known local eatery called Mrs. Wilkes’ Dining Room. At right is Otis Johnson, mayor of Savannah.

The lead photo is by Charles Dharapak of the Associated Press. Pictures downpage show Obama posing with students at Savannah Tech and at Chatham Steel.

The page — which published Wednesday, of course — was designed by Josh Jackson. Morning News assistant managing editor Anita Hagin and Josh teamed up to answer a few questions about how this nice poster page came to be:

Q. That’s a relatively unusual treatment: A huge, half-page photo with no headline at all over the fold. How did you guys come up with that approach?

A. This is the cover to a six-page special section that wrapped around the rest of the paper. (More on that later.)

From the moment we learned of Obama’s trip to Savannah, we knew we were going to do something special. It was a once-in-a-lifetime kind of event for our readers. So a “special” treatment was appropriate.

Originally the idea was to do a poster treatment on the cover — something more vertical — with a shorter intro and refers to inside/Web only material. (We did something similar to that concept for our post-election special section, which was published the Sunday after Obama was elected.)

The challenge in this instance was that our goal from the beginning was to pick the photo that said “Obama in Savannah.”

When we looked at the photos available — both staff and AP — the strongest images were horizontal or square at best. At that point, the consensus was to pick a variety of the best photos that described visually his trip through Savannah.

So in this instance, though we had an early plan, it was important to be flexible enough to change that plan based on the best content (in this case images) we had.

As for the headline, we all agreed that a picture is worth a thousand words. The argument went something like this: We knew the nameplate would be scaled down and placed in the corner of the Mrs. Wilkes’ photo and that the depth of the photo would have pushed the headline beneath the fold anyway, so why muddle the photo even more by placing more type on top of it? The rest of the page design fell into place after that.

Q. About a year or so ago, we noticed papers taking their nameplates down when using special treatments like this. Was this the first time the Morning News did this?

A. The first and only other time we have ever changed the size of the (current) Savannah Morning News nameplate was for Obama’s inauguration. We again went into that front page thinking we were going to have a poster front. But the best photo from that day was the square shot taken of Obama being sworn in next to the first family. We knew we were going to run it the full width of the page. Once it was on the page, though, a few things stood out:

First, the photo was the exact size of half the page. Given that that photo seemed to tell that day’s story and that no words could do a better job, we felt it was appropriate to take the entire top half of the page for the photo.

Second: There was a unique dead space in the sky. That served to our benefit, allowing us to downsize the nameplate and take the entire photo on the top half of the page.

Because that was the first time we had ever changed the size of the flag, we communicated heavily with the executive editor, managing editor, the publisher, and even those higher up in the company. The Savannah Morning News nameplate is our brand, so no one took resizing it lightly.
But, given the importance of news on that day — and again when Obama visited Savannah — we knew that changing the nameplate size would signify to readers just how much we understood the enormity of the news event.

Q. Why that particular photo?

A. It was the best photo.

We have a unique city; we wanted a unique photo. We weren’t looking for another vertical shot of Obama speaking at a podium or walking off of Air Force One – that could be anywhere. We had plenty of podium shots with nice dead space for a headline that some designers like to use, but it’s been done before. This photo shows Obama interacting with the public (in fact, that stop at Mrs. Wilkes’ Dining Room was unplanned, so the patrons received a nice surprise), and it provides a nice sense of place for us Savannahians. (”In fact, the president didn’t realize it, but he was sitting in my chair,” Josh said.)

Q. It’s a wire photo, as opposed to staff art. Did your own shooters not have access to Obama?

A. We had staff photographer Richard Burkhart in the pool. But he was in a secondary pool behind the main AP photographer, so he was positioned much farther back. As he explained it, he was about four rows back. He just couldn’t get the same angle as the AP photographer, whose image showed a much better sense of place. Rich was involved in the editing process for final photo selection and understood we were going for the best photo.

Q. The large picture, no headline, the small nameplate… was any of this a hard sale? How did you push it though?

A. Not really, but that’s largely because we had been talking about a special treatment for weeks. At one point, we did have several editors gathered around Josh’s screen walking through all the reasons. We answered, “Why are we doing this again?” several times in regard to the nameplate, photo play, headline size, etc. Once again, we kept coming back to the notion that a picture is worth a thousand words. Josh’s suggestion in terms of headline treatment was to keep it small (he would have gone a tad smaller, too). But he was right, we didn’t need a screaming 72-point headline competing with the photo and stating the obvious: OBAMA IN TOWN!, or something like that.

Having said that, it was probably easier to downsize the flag given that: 1) we had reduced the size of the flag for the Obama inauguration, and 2) when you peeled away the 6-page section, you still got a more traditional looking Savannah Morning News front that fronted aa 10-page section with all the regularly occuring SMN news content.

Anita told us more about the special 6-page section:

The uniqueness of the Obama coverage went beyond just the cover.

Click on any of these for a larger view:

On pages 2 and 3, we had a time-stamped breakdown of the 3 hours and 40 minutes Obama spent on Savannah soil. Lots of photos were interspersed.

Pages 4, 5 and 6 were devoted to dozens more photos and “vignette” style stories that were gathered by reporters throughout the day — people standing along the motorcade route, people who got to shake his hand (and vowed not to wash their own that night).

In fact, there were only two “traditional” stories in the section. The intent for all 6 pages of the section was to give readers a completely different experience of the presidential visit.

Pages four through six were designed by copy editor and designer Libby Roerig. Click here for a PDF copy of the entire six-page section.

Q. What was the reaction Thursday? Did folks love it? Hate it? Did the paper sell out?

A. People at the newspaper loved it. Folks from every department were stopping by to tell editors they loved the treatment. As for the public, newspaper racks and stands had to be refilled throughout the day. We printed 4,500 more copies than the previous Wednesday, and sales were “brisk” all day, according to circulation director Todd Timmons.

Too, we were getting calls for poster reprints of the front page and some photos, too.

We believe that more people started to pick up the paper throughout the day as people started talking about it.

Find more of Josh Jackson’s work here.

Find online coverage of Obama’s visit here.

Full disclosure: I worked at the Savannah Morning News briefly in the late 1980s.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 4th, 2010 at 4:16 pm and is filed under Innovative ideas, News design, Photojournalism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.