Charles Apple

A roundup of eight — count ‘em, eight — visual journalism items for your Friday reading pleasure…

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LATEST YOUTUBE STAR: RICHARD CURTIS?

Well, he’s not getting quite as many hits as a RickRoll.

But hey, he’s Richard Curtis, Managing Editor for Design, Photography and Graphics at USA Today and he’s got a lot to say about news design, graphics and the early days of “MacPaper.”

Michigan State’s outstanding Karl Gude posted a series of six video interviews with Richard at YouTube. You can find them all easily, however, on VizEds‘ latest videos page.

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QUAD-CITIES’ BILL BOOTZ RETURNS TO OKIELAND

Bill Bootz, Assistant Managing Editor for Presentation at the Quad Cities Times, announced this week he was stepping down because of family reasons and returning home to Oklahoma City.

Bill at the VizEds lunchon
at SND/Houston, 2005.
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Bill went to the QCT in August, replacing Greg Swanson. Bill had been a sports copy editor and then sports news editor and then Presentation Editor of The Oklahoman, working in Oklahoma City for nearly ten years in all.

Best wishes to my good friend Bill. Please take care.

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COMPETING REDESIGN PROJECTS? YOU’RE NUTS…

Entertainment Weekly magazine wants to redesign.

But rather than hire a consultant to work on it — you know; how it’s usually done — the magazine is holding what’s being called a “bake-off”: Multiple redesigns are underway, with the publisher to pick the winner.

Women’s Wear Daily reported this week:

According to sources close to the title, John Korpics, Paula Scher, Geraldine Hessler (the magazine’s art director) and Richard Baker are all said to have presented redesigns for EW. The process is based on what the magazine publisher did with the redesign of Time, when Pentagram’s Luke Hayman was the winner of that contest.

It’s nice to see that there’s an in-house proposal coming.

Oh, and a clue for the contestants: Make sure you use Gotham as your main headline font.

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AT YOUR NEWSTAND NOW: NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC PARODY

The infamous Harvard Lampoon has done it again. This time, their target is National Geographic.

Says the Lampoon’s web site:

The issue’s cover features socialite and Harvard Lampoon “Woman of the Year” Paris Hilton as she’s never been seen before: sexy and glamorous. More shocking than Lindsay Lohan’s pictorial spread in New York magazine, Paris Hilton strips down as an homage to superhottie Jane Goodall in “Paris Hilton After Dark—Your Wildest Animal Fantasies.”

Other features include:

• Top Ten Rainiest Rainforests—Will this be the Amazon’s year?
• Mongolia’s Wildest Waterparks
• Baskets on Heads—A Retrospective
• Native Girls Gone Wild
• What the Beijing Olympic Committee Doesn’t Want You to Know
• Boobs You Can Look at in the Dentist’s Office

These guys are a scream. I have a number of their publications in my collection, including the Time parody from 1989 and the USA Today spoof from 1986.

Find it at a newstand near you for $5.95.

You remember newsstands, don’t you? That’s where you could find printed media. Back in my day, we printed news. On paper…

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CHARLES BLOW RETURNS TO THE NYT

Speaking of National Geographic…

SND/Update’s Tyson Evans reported this week that the venerable Charles Blow — former graphics director and deputy design director of The New York Times who left about a year-and-a-half ago to become art director of National Geographic — is rejoining the Times.

Update quotes a memo by Times editorial page editor Andy Rosenthal:

He is returning to us as a columnist, but an entirely new kind of columnist — a visual columnist, if you will. Charles will do his own Op-Charts, lending his formidable skills and distinct style to that form of opinion journalism. And, equally exciting, he will create a new kind of journalistic space on our website. I’d call it a blog if I were given to using that word. Charles envisions a gathering place for visual journalists, especially those who use numbers and images and charts to express opinion.

Sounds incredibly interesting. And there’s no one better than Charles to pull this off.

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SLATE SAVAGES NYT‘S REDESIGNED A SECTION

Speaking of The New York Times…

Slate’s Jack Shafer doesn’t like the expanded “Inside the Times” summary feature The New York Times kicked off two weeks ago.

He doesn’t like it at all:

For ink-stained page turners, it was as if the quicksilver Times had put out deck chairs and free tea and invited readers to linger over the news—instead of bolting after it like wild dogs. For many veteran readers of the Times, these magaziney table-of-contents pages fit like a loose suit and read like a celebration of white space.

What did the paper cut to accommodate this expansion? Tom Bodkin, assistant managing editor and design director at the Times, says the paper’s new kickoff doesn’t come at the expense of any inside news or features. And rather than trying to ruin the paper with a Chinese-restaurant-length menu, Bodkin asserts that he is trying to improve the paper.

The sarcastic italics on “improve,” in that last sentence, are Shafer’s, not mine.

In case you’ve not seen it, here’s the deal: The NYT used to have a page of summary on page A2. It was essentially a capsulized index. A lot of papers do this.

The new format includes two facing pages — A2 and A3 — of summary-index material and then a fourth page — A4 — that includes summaries of stories at the NYT web site as well as the day’s corrections.

Shafer says:

Now the newspaper reads as if it begins with three speed bumps.

Shafer seems to feel that this increased emphasis on summaries comes at the cost of newshole. Not an unreasonable objection.

Bodkin doesn’t help by getting defensive. Shafer quotes him as responding:

“The criticism I’ve heard is, ‘We’ve got to plow through four pages until we get to the real news?’ You know, plowing through four pages? I feel like I’d like to put together a little video that shows you how to turn two pages,” Bodkin says. “If you’re not interested in that two-three feature, skip it.”

Heh. At least they didn’t screw with the crossword.

Read the whole thing here.

How did Shafer even see the new summary pages? As we recall, Shafer loved the 2006 redesign of the Times‘ web site so much that he canceled his print subscription. And he encouraged us all to do the same.

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WHY NEWSPAPERS ARE INEFFECTIVE WITH YOUTH EFFORTS

Multimedia consultant Maegan Carberry — formerly of RedEye and The Huffington Post — writes at Editor & Publisher how newspapers usually kick off youth-targeted initiatives:

“I’ve got a great idea: Let’s assemble a team of innovative people and research new ways to attract young readers! We’ll ask Kate from the Calendar section to lead it; I’m pretty sure she has a Facebook page.”

…The fact is: Kate is paying lip service to your project while she’s logged on to mediabistro.com looking for her next job in online media on company time.

Not only does the crusty old guy with the police beat and Star Wars action figures on his desk creep her out, but why would any intelligent, ambitious storyteller train in print journalism anymore unless she aspired to put Barbara Ehrenreich’s “Nickled and Dimed” poverty to shame with her first-person account of being laid off and homeless?

Her nut graf is that the folks who are, in fact, on the cutting edge of new media are:

[not just] courting young readers. We’re building a new approach to journalism and the dissemination of information in our global society.

It’s not a committee or a font or an A1 story about “American Idol.” It’s a shift in the way we view ourselves and the news business initiated by leaders who instill the attitude as a virtue among their team members.

It’s blowing up that thing you hold in your hands and trying something drastically different with a sense of urgency. It’s the building of multi-media communities where social networking tools will bring us away from the speculation of editors at desks reading wire stories and closer to a model where users organically define what is newsworthy and technology will deliver it in the packaging that makes sense.

Powerful stuff. It’s worth a read.

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APPLE TO NYC: DROP DEAD

Wired reported Thursday that Apple computer has filed an opposition to New York City’s trademark application for its new GreeNYC publicity push.

The problem? Apple says that the city’s “Big Apple”-themed logo is too similar to its own logo:

Wired reports:

The Cupertino, California, company calls for the trademark to be denied, claiming the city’s logo will confuse people and “seriously injure the reputation which [Apple] has established for its goods and services.”

New York says: Getdafugoutaheya.

“The city believes that Apple’s claims have no merit and that no consumer is likely to be confused,” says Gerald Singleton, the intellectual-property lawyer representing the Big Apple. “This well-known city is using its new design in a variety of contexts that have absolutely nothing to do with Apple Inc.”

Hey, I love Apple as much as anyone. But they’re way off base here. This opposition must be the brainchild of the same corporate genius behind the push to shut down computer news and rumor sites.

If Apple succeeds here, what’s next? Forcing NYC to call itself The Big Banana? A restraining order against Granny Smith?

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Until next week, this is your humble blogger, Charles Pomegranate, reporting…

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