Ethnique Media :: Le Blog

To continue on the design push, I want to share a great link: The Book Cover Archive is a site dedicated to collecting and displaying the best designed book covers.

Books, magazines and newspapers are all different incarnations of the same medium, and I re-iterate my view that newspaper design can be treated more like magazine design, especially when it comes to the front page (and actually other key pages too).

This is where newspaper designers can take cue from book covers; very often, book covers are the only heavily design oriented portion of a book. And they are a central part of its sales-appeal, they are often the last message publishers can throw at potential customers in order to close a sale. The same could be said of newspapers.

There is a small controversy brewing as we speak. Yesterday, AP announced that it will seeking to protect its content from online sites that use it’s headlines, basically threatening to sue aggregators showing its headlines. Aggregators are sites, like Google News or the Drudge Report that simply show (aggregate) a set of popular/relevant headlines. This behavior on the part of AP is ridiculous, as all legal aggregator sites always link to the original version of the story, basically driving billions of visitors to the websites of newspapers around the world.

Today, the CEO of Google gave the closing keynote speech at the Newspaper Association of America’s annual conference, attempting to address the issues that newspapers execs have.

Read the story, but I believe that newspaper execs are barking at the wrong dog, and are miserably failing to understand that the issue lies with their content and their online pricing strategy, not with Google or other news aggregators.

Newspapers need to reinvent themselves and their pricing strategy on the Internet. Apple’s iTunes has showed that people are ready to pay for a good service on the Web, now it is time for newspapers to follow suit. Newspapers need to concentrate on creating creative and original content, not just reprint AP and other wire stories.

Once the creative content is there, you can charge customers to access this original material online. If no one else can provide for free the same quality and content of coverage on a certain topic, then customers will pay to read online. Opinion stories, rich editorials, investigative journalism, local coverage, community (or ethnic) coverage: all these could be original and unique content that readers would pay for.

And it doesn’t need to cost a lot, because a million readers at a certain price, the money adds up very quickly.

Here is an inspiring short talk by Jacek Utko, a Polish designer, about the impact that quality design can have on the life of a newspaper. Visit the About > How I work section of his website to read-up on his 7 step strategy for redesigning a newspaper. Basically, he sees quality design as something much more than a graphical exercise, he sees it as an overall strategy for revamping the newspaper experience. I couldn’t agree more with his philosophy; and with one of the remarks he makes in the video, when he equates newspaper design to poster design.