Daryl Moen on newspaper design

newspaper techniques: Has there been a fundamental change in newspaper design in the past 10 or 15 years?

Daryl Moen: In my view, it hasn’t changed much. Most of the designs that are coming out are not unlike they were for the last 10 years.

I think where you are seeing differences is in the niche publications and specifically in the youth market niche publications, like the ones Gannett has started up in the past few years … the design there is a little different, and it should be because you’re after a niche market they have different characteristics and this is a young market so those publications are much more colourful, much more likely to discard some of the standard rules, and I think they are probably more influenced by Internet than they are by traditional print design.

And the other end of that niche design revolution I think is on the slick magazines that are being putting out by some newspapers … high end real estate magazines, glossy paper, really spiffy. That genre that’s out there that has to adapt to its niche, and that’s where most of the innovations to me come from.

In the dailies, you know there’s some, the Baltimore Sun is retro I would say. I’m a little surprised there isn’t more of that, because we’ve had this design now for years and years, and it’s just like anything else in design, whether you’re talking about fashion, architecture, automobiles you know, Chrysler brings back a retro-looking car, and you would think there would probably be more, I’ve really kind of been expecting more of this in the newspaper business – more vertical, more everything, well Baltimore to me is really the one that has done that but whether that establishes any sort of a trend, I would doubt.

Beyond that, there are really more little things that I see than big things.

Little things in the sense of for instance the Post-Dispatch in St. Louis is really working hard to do pull-out summaries of stories, identifying the crux, the conflict of stories talking about what’s next and asking questions like “so what?” they’ll label them So what? and what’s next?

On all of their major stories they’ll have these kinds of pull-outs above the headlines or below the headline but before the story starts… but they are more than anybody I see and more than anybody I know of in the country they are trying to work this on a consistent basis daily.

On a day-to-day basis any individual copy editor who’s writing that stuff sometimes does a bad job, or they’re kind of childish or sometimes you can see they’re reaching - they don’t understand the story well enough, but they’re getting better on a consistent basis.

When we talk about layering stories, there are readers who don’t have time and they read headlines, well these kind of nuggents offer much more depth, if you can call this depth than any headline and deck could do.

newspaper techniques: In terms of design, how well do you think most newspapers are coping with the trend toward smaller formats. Are they pulling it off?

Daryl Moen: Yeah, I think they are, from a design standpoint I think they are, now content is whole nother problem.

The number of pages that we’re producing is going down and certainly the page size has gone down, so we’ve lost of a lot of content and newspapers are coping with that in various and sundry ways and from a design standpoint, some of them the pressure obviously, and I’m not privvy to this, but you just look at the publication and you can see there’s a pressure to preserve some of the newshole, so it may effect the leading where they’re running tighter leading and tighter spacing throughout the paper so they can pick up an extra 1 or 2 or 3 percent newshole than the might have under their old system or where you might really like to have it.

That’s the downside of that. I think there are a few newspapers doing that, but by and large most of the redesigns I have seen have stuck with more white space, sort of the trends of the last 10 years and are trying to maintain the presentation values that were there before the downsizing.

I think you see the introduction of more condensed type, certainly in headlines and that’s just for better count, and in text type more condensed types, and I don’t mean condensed so that you can see it, but condensed drawn into the typeface that are slightly more vertical and less wide so that you get a better letter count per line without really damaging ledgability and I think that’s one of the things that’s happening, and I think that typographers will be called upon to design even more textfonts that do it even better.

newspaper techniques: When you’re looking at papers, both broadsheet and the more compact what common mistakes are you seeing, what could most designers be doing better?

Daryl Moen: I think that we often loss focus on the reader. And that we forget we are trying to do this for readers, and I think a lot of the people in our business have never read any of the research about how people use newspapers and they go through and some designers certainly are guilty of designing for designers. And so they waste a lot of space, they go overboard, everything is out of proportion and so forth and so on to make a splash.

And then there are others who don’t help the reader understand stories.

The St. Louis attempt that I talked about earlier, I think is a device to help readers understand stories, especially the so what and what’s next aspects of them, which are two key elements.

Any copy editor working on a desk day after day gets to know the newsflow and knows all these things, but we kind of forget that the readers don’t, a lot of readers don’t.

Just keeping your eye on the reader for goodness sake - just the assumption that they are as keyed into these news elements as we are, and it just doesn’t happen.

In addition to teaching design and other subjects at the University of Missouri-Columbia for the past three decades, Daryl Moen is a former managing editor of three daily newspapers, the author of the book Newspaper Layout & Design, and has redesigned 18 newspapers, the most recent of which, the Jefferson City News Tribune, launched on 20 February 2006.

Interview conducted by Brian Veseling, senior editor of newspaper techniques.


Page first published: 18.01.2006