Illustrating the value of ’sunshine laws’ for your readers
I was delighted to find an interesting centerpiece on the front of today’s Times of Shreveport, La., illustrating the value of open meeting laws.
Click for a much larger view:
What Shreveport did, of course, was to take five days of front pages and then mark out all the stories or photos that wouldn’t have existed, were it not for public records and public meeting laws. Each redacted story is numbered and keyed to a list down the left side.
The whole package makes for a very interesting alternative story form.
The reporter — the Times‘ Alison Bath — tells us:
Unfortunately, we can’t take too much credit. Today’s ASF on Sunshine laws is modeled after something I saw a Dallas Morning News columnist do online.
And there’s nothing wrong with repurposing an idea. That’s one of the reasons for this blog — to give folks ideas or starting points of ideas for creative solutions for their own papers.
It’s especially OK, though, when one is as gracious as Alison and her paper has been about attributing this particular idea. Note the part of her intro copy that I’ve highlighted:
Oooh. Very classy.
Alison answered a few questions for us:
Q. Who designed this page?
A. Our graphics artist David Wright designed the page.
Q. It’s a very clever idea and you pulled it off beautifully. How did the idea originate?
A. I came up with the idea (based on the DMN piece).
Q. I can easily imagine something like this on an inside page or an op/ed page. But finding this on A1 today was a surprise. Was this a hard sell in your newsroom? Or was the idea approved easily?
A. It wasn’t a hard sell at all. The managing editor and executive editor were very receptive.
It was, however, my plan B. My original idea had been to take today’s cover (Monday, March 15) and black out the appropriate stories, then supply the “real” cover on page 3. As you can imagine that idea didn’t go over as well as the alternate. But it was worth a try, anyway.
Q. I’m often asked for advice on how to sell different or creative A1 ideas. What advice would you have for a designer at a small paper who wanted to pitch an offbeat idea like this?
A. Have more than one idea for a project or story to pitch. In this case, it really came in handy to have the alternate idea that essentially got the same point across as creatively. It made it easier for the decision makers to say yes.
Nice work, Alison and David.
March 16th, 2010 at 9:42 pm
And the DMN columnist wasn’t the first to do this. I remember seeing this in J-school back in the 1980s, only that newspaper did it with a false front page that was in the slot for the true front page.
In other words, the first thing readers saw in the morning was a mostly blacked-out A1. Page A3 contained the real front page.
It’s a great idea, no matter who thought of it first.