Charles Apple

For your holiday weekend reading pleasure, we thought we’d bring you a brief selection of unusual Friday fronts…

First up is this nice over-the-nameplate treatment by designer Joe Jayjack and photographer Justin Hayworth of the Des Moines Register:

Fireworks shots are nothing new on A1 this time of year, of course. The question becomes: How do you make it look different?

You probably don’t want to mess with the nameplate every day. But every once in a while, this kind of treatment can be quite nice. Especially if you handle it as well as this.

Huntsville, on the other hand, did something quite different. We’ve all seen diagrams that explain how fireworks work and how they get all those different colors. But the Times went with a page-one buyer’s guide approach:

Design director Tim Ball tells us:

I designed today’s front, but really, any credit should go to Jon Busdeker, one of our entertainment reporters, who tested all the fireworks and reported on them with a perfect, whimsical tone. I really just tried to match that a bit.

The safety primer — and details of what the law says about where you can and can’t set off fireworks in our circulation area — ran on the jump of our other fireworks story off the front page. We did ponder putting it out front, but didn’t get any calls about its placement, as far as I know.

Jon’s recommended best buys and duds are clearly marked, there on the front. Find the story online here. There’s even a video showing each firework — so you can check them out yourself — on the web site. The background music of Elvis Presley singing America the Beautiful is a nice touch.

Huntsville, by the way, has an average daily circulation of about 57,000.

Speaking of fireworks, our next designer is on fire: Jon Benedict of the Virginian-Pilot. This marks the third time in two weeks we’ve cited one of his exceptional pages here in the blog (previous mentions here and here).

The story was about an enormous traffic jam Thursday — perhaps one of the largest ever, here in Hampton Roads — that tied up traffic literally all day. It was a disaster — and it suggests that, if we ever had a big hurricane or something here — there could be a lot of folks caught, unable to evacuate:

Note the awesomely dramatic vertical crop on the lead photo. Note the decks and the map. Note the downplayed nameplate. Note the huge headline. (I know, I know: I’m a sucker for pun headlines. But this one works really well.)

We’ll run this one, Jon. But from here on, we’re billing you each time we mention you here in the blog.

Y’know, it wasn’t very long ago when we weren’t allowed to run photos of fallen soldiers returning from the Middle East. The law has been relaxed quite a bit recently, and Newsday today used such a photo to tremendous effect:

Credit the Associated Press with the picture. Nice headline placement and a wonderful crop by the folks at Newsday.

Speaking of pun headlines, we found this one a real LOL moment today:

That’s in Waterbury, Conn., you see. The punny hed was conceived by Bill O’Brien, we’re told.

Terrific photo, too, by the Republican-American’s Gina Vierra. The paper has an average daily circulation of about 51,000.

And we’ll close with another barrel of yuks — or is it yucks? — from Chicago’s RedEye:

With this front, apparently, RedEye’s designers are aiming for the respect of their peers. *Ba-dum Bump*

Meanwhile, we’ll be looking for any interesting or unusual July 4th treatments Saturday. We know we can count on something cool from the Herald of Rock Hill, S.C., for example. But do you have an interesting presentation in the works? Feel free to e-mail it to us tonight or tip us off so we can pull it up via the Newseum tomorrow:

chuckapple [at] cox.net

And we were just talking about this yesterday…

Here is the front page o the St. Petersburg Times‘ TBT that appeared in the Newseum today:

That’s an ad wrapped around the tabloid paper, clearly marked in red up top: “Special Advertising Wrap.”

These things are still unusual — perhaps decreasingly so, but unusual. This one is more unusual in that, like the Chicago Tribune wrap we wrote about in May, it shows readers a small image of the real front page.

Unusual. But honest.

The other unusual thing about this front: Typically, we find, papers don’t release a Spadea or a wrap to the Newseum. We find that refreshing as well.

Make no mistake: We really hate the fact that readers are finding ads, rather than editorial copy, displayed on what’s perceived as the front of their newspaper. But we understand its’ keeping more of us from getting laid off.

Find our discussion here about an advertising Spadea wrapped around yesterday’s Virginian-Pilot.

Like several folks commented yesterday: Get used to it.

I’ve lauded the Virginian-Pilot many, many times for its inventive ways to surprise, delight and inform its readers. Just last week, for example, I applauded work on a metro front and for its Michael Jackson front page.

(And full disclosure, to anyone who doesn’t know: I spent four-and-a-half years running the Pilot’s news graphics operation.)

But today, I got up, fixed breakfast, opened up my morning paper and was immediately disappointed by the front of today’s edition:

Yes, that’s a Spadea advertisement, covering half of today’s front page. Not only that, but the right side of the page — the side not covered by the giant appliance ad — is graced with a vertical two-column ad for a building supply company.

You can see a one-column refer rail and part of an elaborate skybox refer above the nameplate. But for real, live editorial copy, all you can see here is one story. And only a few inches of that, even.

Here’s what the paper looks like when you open the Spadea:

Ah, now, that’s more like it.

Note how the hed on the lead story is stacked in the rightmost two columns. That suggests the A1 designer at least knew a Spadea was coming, at least. Smart move.

But does giving the reader such a tiny peek at live editorial copy help sell papers? I doubt it. But sometimes it’s not about selling papers. Sometimes, it’s about selling ads.

Denis Finley, editor of the Pilot, tells us:

Yes, this is a first.  I’m not crazy about it, but it pays the bills.  The best we could do was to get two lively topics at the top of the page to draw readers in.

Most of our single-copy papers are vended, not boxed, so prospective customers are able to peel back the spadea if they want to see the rest of the page.  It’s effective for the advertiser that’s for sure, and readers have the option of pulling it off and saving it, or discarding it.  So it goes.

It’s a first for an ad, but in fact, for several years, the Pilot ran a Spadea around A1 on holidays and at the start of every weekend, from Memorial Day to Labor Day. The Norfolk/Virginia Beach area, after all, is a resort area. The idea was to reach out to vacationers and help guide them to cool things to do, besides enjoy seafood and lay out on the beach.

The front of each Spadea was brightly illustrated with plenty of refers and tezes, with special thought given to rack presence:

Inside the Spadea was a small area map, a tip on a day-trip vacationers could take and other things to do across the region — which, by the way, consists of five large cities on this side of the James River and two more on the other side. It really is a happenin’ place, especially in the summer.

Our A1 designers always knew when the Spadeas were running and adjusted their deisign so that the lede headline would not be covered up. They’d sometimes even ditch promos or skyboxes. No sense in putting a teze above the nameplate if nobody can see it, right?

So what’s the difference, then, between running these weekly editorial-driven Spadeas — which the Pilot ran for four years, if I’m not mistaken — and the advertising Spadea that wrapped it today?

I honestly can’t tell you while I like the old Spadeas but not the new. Perhaps it’s simply the old geezer in me coming out. I readily admit, though, that if selling this ad keeps from laying off another of my former staffers or colleagues, I’m all in favor of it. Dammit.

Now, when the Chicago Tribune recently added an A1 Spadea — well, a Spadea-sized ad, anyway — it shrunk down the image of its front page and floated it into the white space to the right of the ad. “Your Full Tribune Inside,” said a big headline:

Not a perfect solution, either, admittedly. Read more about that here.

Find our recent post here about increasingly intrusive advertisements.

Donovan Atkinson, assistant news editor of the Oshkosh (Wis.) Northwestern wrote this week to tell us of the way his paper is commemorating the movie Public Enemies, which opens this week. A good chunk of the movie was filed in Oshkosh last year.

Donovan writes:

Public Enemies is being released Wednesday in most theaters, but Oshkosh was chosen to host an advance screening on Tuesday. We decided to do an eight-page throwback section for the Sunday edition that will also be sold on the streets Tuesday to tie-in with the screening.

The front page of the special section (click for a larger view):

The section features photos from the filming, movie stills, maps of the locations used in town and profiles of area residents who were extras in the film. I was responsible for assembling the pages; it took three days as I also had our regular editions to put out at the same time.

Inside pages (again, click for a larger view):

Donovan points out that last page, page seven — the one with the giant map — was designed by the paper’s creative director, Dan Higgins. Page eight was a full page ad.

The whole project is a revisit of an idea from last year, Donovan says:

Last April, the paper published three four-page wraps for its A section designed to simulate like a 1930s newspaper while the film crew shot scenes in Oshkosh’s downtown and airport. Drama students from a private high school dressed as newsboys and hawked the papers downtown to residents and tourists that came to watch the filming. The “retro” editions were very popular.

The front of those wraps (once again, click each for a larger view):

The Northwestern is a Gannett-owned daily with an average circulation of about 22,000.

We love clever movie tie-ins. You saw the one from the Florida Times-Union for the movie Up, right? Or the Virginian-Pilot’s Watchmen page? Or stuff for last year’s Dark Knight movie here, here and here? Or a whole series of special entertainment tabs from the 33,000-circulation Victoria (Texas) Advocate?

Do you have any interesting movie related pages or features treatments from this summer? Transformers? Star Trek? Harry Potter?

Send ‘em!

Last fall, the Hartford Courant redesigned as part of an overall Tribune company redesign mandate. One of the dramatic changes to a paper that many agreed was one of the nations’ best-designed: Pushing the paper’s nameplate vertically down the side of A1.

A couple of weeks ago, the Courant began asking readers to sound off on which prototype A1 they prefer: What they were doing then, something more conventional or something with a nameplate reversed out of blue.

Today, the Courant changed the look of its front. On the left is a live page from April; on the right is today’s A1:

The Associated Press reports today:

The Hartford Courant has a new, old look, ditching a redesign in had put in place last fall.

On Monday, the newspapers returned its masthead to the top of the front page.

A closer look at the new front:

Find the brief AP story here.

—–
UPDATE

Poynter’s Sara Quinn also wrote about this on Wednesday, July 1. Find that piece here.