By Monica Moses
Newspapers have an image problem, especially among the young. This worries me, even on days like today.
None of my four twentysomething nephews, all smart, worldly guys, read this morning’s newspaper, even though print journalism threw everything it had at readers today.
My nephews and their friends read other stuff–books, magazines, websites. But the local daily newspaper? It’s too slow, too obvious, too predictable. It rehashes what they saw on TV last night, and too often the new stuff is hidden in 9-point text.
In the dozens of fronts sent to Poynter overnight, you see an interesting range. There are daring, visceral pages the twentysomethings I know would like. And then there are the pages their grandparents might prefer–especially if they are also editors.
We got papers that recapped the events of yesterday as if readers did not spend six hours glued to TV news last night. The first priority of those papers, it appears, is to apply the conventions of journalism and record history, thereby creating an account readers may trust.
But there are other papers that take a different, more intuitive, more youthful approach. The front pages of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, The Sun (Bremerton, Wash,), The Virginian-Pilot, and the South Florida Sun-Sentinel appear to be reaching out more than documenting. The tone of the conspicuous elements–principally headlines and images–seems calculated to reach readers where they live on the morning after catastrophe. Informationally and emotionally, these papers are in touch. They appear more reader-centric than journalist-centric.
I see two approaches in today’s front pages: the conventional and the communal. If we want to reach twentysomethings, if we want journalism to be relevant in the future, I believe we must become more communal.
On conventional pages such as The Philadelphia Inquirer, The New York Times, The Star-Ledger, and The (Huntington, W. Va.) Herald-Dispatch, are the iconic World Trade Center pictures people saw on television. The headlines, too, are familiar. Some even recap the most obvious events of the day — “Hijacked jets level World Trade Center,” “Hijacked jetliners ram Twin Towers, Pentagon.”
As I look at those pages, I can hear my nephews saying, “Yeah, yeah, I know all that; tell me something new.”
But, wait, traditionalist editors will object, the front page needs to recapitulate. It must stand as a self-contained record. It needs to pass the test of time; it needs to be intelligible in 20 years when a historian looks at it or a journalist finds it in the attic. It’s a keepsake, a document.
We newspaper people hold our paper-of-record traditions very dear. But if we make the paper a keepsake for the future, we risk making it seem irrelevant today.
Some papers that took a largely conventional approach at least presented new information in text or images. The News & Observer ran a dramatic Washington Post narrative about Barbara Olson’s last phone call that probably few readers expected. The Dallas Morning News pulled out the events of Tuesday in a “Day of Terror” box, thereby avoiding a predictable, paper-of-record mainbar. And the same paper took the unusual and interesting step of putting an editorial on the front; that’s so old-fashioned it’s hip.
Some papers, such as The Austin American-Statesman and Dallas Morning News, used haunting images from the wreckage in New York that their readers were unlikely to have seen. Those pictures speak tens of thousands of words.
My hopes rest with the papers whose front pages are more artful and truly communicative than arms-length conventional newspapering allows.
The Pilot, so often fresh in approach, took the rare step of running a black background behind the page. The Pilot page is a grim poster. To me, it says, “Dear Community, we’ve been through something awful. Let’s pause, join hands, take a breath, and mark that.”
The Milwaukee front manages to be both powerful and understated. The headlines are minimalist in both style and content. If you find this section in your attic in 20 years, you’ll have to look inside to remember all the facts. But you’ll probably be moved by the cover nonetheless.
After a day like Tuesday, facts only go so far.
By Jim Naughton
The slug of this piece is Caveman.
That reflects the genteel but insistent manner in which Monica Moses, an artistic and modern news designer, and I, a grizzled Neanderthal editor, differ over the purpose of Page One.
Monica, the neojournalist, takes the view that you’ve already seen the airplane crashing into the World Trade Center a dozen times at least, and that your front page the next morning must take into account that it’s old news. She can and does express it better, in the accompanying piece.
For me, Tuesday’s tragic events make the case, definitively, that the front of the daily newspaper is raw history, that it is the means by which we journalists put events into coherent form for the community. I don’t care if you’ve already watched the news on television. Print can tell it anew, and sometimes better, in a manner that provides context, breadth, and depth and, importantly, durability.
Don’t misunderstand. I’m not suggesting Page One designers be oblivious to what people have seen on screens or heard on the air. I’m suggesting that there is lasting value in relating news in a way that defines its import. It still must be told artistically and compellingly.
My case is exemplified by the number of newspapesr whose staffs produced urgent Extra editions. Poynter’s website is full– overfull, truth be told–of multi-megabyte examples of the front pages of those Extras.
In newsrooms that issued an Extra, the editors faced Tuesday night a fascinating conundrum: Now what?
They could come back Wednesday morning with a second-day accounting of the terrorist attacks. After all, not only had any sentient American seen the news on TV yesterday, the newspaper already had reported it in the Extra.Or those editors could publish Wednesday morning a different, more complete and better constructed version of the first-day account, one that gave every reader– including those who hadn’t been among the relative few to get the Extra — a record of the tragedy’s import and urgency.
As Poynter’s thumbnail images of Wednesday fronts document, editors decided they had an obligation to tell the story that everyone already knew. Sorry, Monica.
This was not vanity or tradition at work. It was purpose. The daily newspaper may change form one day. It may be delivered electronically, or printed in your kitchen rather than on a giant press in a remote building. But its function in our society should continue to be to provide the community with a reliable, coherent record of events worth noting.
Well, sure, you might say, but Tuesday’s tragic events were the exception, a story too big to be told but once. What happened Tuesday and is reflected on Wednesday’s front pages is not, thankfully, a common occurrence. It’s very big news, as big as news gets.
In the electronic age, it will be even more valuable for print to be print, not an inky version of the more ephemeral TV news broadcast.
At its best, even in less urgent times, the front page serves a purpose of making events understandable and widely known.
If, like me, you have a TiVo attached to your television set, it is possible — except for days like Sept. 11 — to organize your viewing in a way that totally blocks newscasts.
The advent of digital radio makes it possible to ignore news in your car or your home or your office, if you choose.
And while the computer screen is an incredible tool for gathering information, so far it has not demonstrated great capacity to broadcast news to a mass audience. The user can readily program it to provide a narrow slice of events in which the user is most interested.
There is nothing as efficient or, even with reduced circulation, so mass as the medium of the daily newspaper.
You can, of course, crunch the sports section into a ball, wrap fish heads in the business agate, put the metro news beneath the parakeet. But when the newspaper sits in the box on the corner or on the stack in the convenience store or when it plops on your driveway or stoop, it is making a statement about events you might need to know. As you pick it up, even to throw away the front section, it can make an impact with its headline about important events. If you merely mean to scan it en route to the comic strips, it can serendipitously grab your attention and tell you a valuable tale.
Demeaning that purpose by making the front page a mere poster can diminish the very essence of journalism.
You didn’t need a front page to tell you the World Trade Center was in ruins, thousands of innocents buried within it.
But Page One codified the magnitude of what happened.
That’s why I still have, and occasionally have re-read, the front section of the Nov. 23, 1963, issue of The Plain Dealer. It is a way of remembering how tragically the presidency of John F. Kennedy was ended.
That’s news. Front-page stuff.
Reader Responses
{Editor’s note: Some letters have been edited for space.}
Kudos to the Caveman
I cannot disagree more with Monica Moses’ assessment of the function of a newspaper’s front page. Newspapers serve a purpose of recording history — the first draft, if you will. People rely on newspapers to analyze and recount events in a coherent manner. That is something that television and the Internet can’t come close to accomplish. I watched yesterday’s events on television shortly after it began and still, I was expecting newspapers to provide me a complete picture of what had taken place. To my chagrin, I failed to obtain even a single copy of The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today or any of the out-of-town papers anywhere in the East Bay area of San Francisco. They were all gone by 8 a.m. If your nephews and their friends don’t read newspapers, it’s surely their loss. Everyone else, evidently, is reading. Kudos to the Caveman.
Sincerely,
Samuel Chi
Didn’t run overall story and now feels vindicated
I just wanted to thank you, Monica Moses, for the opinion you asserted when arguing front-page coverage for the day after the terrorist attacks. I am the news editor at The Daily Orange, Syracuse University’s independent, student-run newspaper, and before seeing anything you wrote, I had already made the decision not to run an overall event story on the front and instead ran a local story about what people are doing on campus and a color story about the feeling in NYC on Tuesday night. Since that time, I have been reamed out by half of the people I work with and several professors. I actually thought for a moment I had invented reasons why it made sense and second guessed myself — until I read your column.
So, thank you!
Ashleigh Graf
Newspapers will survive if they publish NEWS, not OLDS
Monica Moses’ piece on front pages is right on the money on a number of counts. Our time zone made Tuesday’s attacks same-day, regular run afternoon news for us, since we are an all-day newspaper. Our philosophy is to give people the NEWS, not the OLDS. Our afternoon editions have the luxury of being produced while events on the mainland are happening, closer to real time than any newspaper in the country. Today’s news today.
Your point is accurate, but not because we need to make the newspaper relevant to twenty-somethings. We need to make our papers relevant to everyone. We ARE competing with TV, especially on huge stories such as this where large portions of our customer base are glued to network news. If we don’t give our customers news with headlines, photos, graphics and design that gets people’s attention, we’re outta there. Well done.
Joe Edwards
Honolulu Star-Bulletin
Columnist, 81, says use photos to reach readers
Monica Moses’ piece on reader-centric treatment of Page 1A was, to me, the heart of the matter applied to the Sept. 11 incident, or to the big stories. Or to daily coverage in the mind of the editor eager to keep readers interested in what goes on and, possibly, why.
I believe in photos played right — so they are a part of the story, not a second thought, headline separator, “Uh, I think we got one to go with this story.” The story is the picture and the words together. And the caption, rightly written and, like the hed, all in one piece, supplement each other ó for the reader. Spare me the torrent of words that tries to pack it all in and lessens your chance of absorbing what relevant pix can do for you.
As to what Page 1A is all about: I always felt that I wanted on 1A stories that would make a [potential] reader start reading. Each day, one story that would catch the reader. It might be the lead story. I’m not talking about gimmicks. Reading-with-interest is apt to get a person into the reading habit that is apt to get him to read more of the paper that day. A serious paper does not have to be solemnly declaring its intent every minute — better let the reader conclude that himself.
Laying out 1A: Build it around the picture[s]. So they can be felt. As an editor, I had good photographers. And sometimes, a story-in-caption belonged at the top of the front page when the lead story did not. A careful caption can serve as a 10-point headline — that is, supplementing the main hed. I picked that up from tight Life or Look layouts with a short story block and captions that saved space. At 81, I am still writing a weekly political-explainer column to keep the busy informed in language that, hopefully, they can use.
Bob Moore, columnist
MetroWest Daily News, Framingham, Mass.
(former editor, The Middlesex News)
Clear stories off the front, but run the iconic picture
I was part of the huddled masses who designed Milwaukee’s 1A for Wednesday. I wanted a documentary photo. We didn’t use one because we had used it in the extra. I agree with Naughton that the relative few who saw that photo in the extra should not affect our use of it later. The photo we did choose — I call it the Dresden photo — was the right one once some of us lost the debate for an exploding towers photo. Funny that the reason we chose to look forward was NOT solely because we were overconcerned about what people had seen on TV as much as what they had seen in our paper (the extra). I was extremely pleased that those of us who wanted a 1A free of stories won out. That step was huge here. It was the most vigorous part of our debate. Our editor surprised us by leaning this way from the get-go of the debate, though he just let people talk for awhile, which was great.
Bob Friday, news design editor
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Naughton’s right: The front page is about history
I must agree with both of Jim Naughton’s points. I, too, have the original front section of my hometown paper about the assassination of John F. Kennedy which I also re-read on occasion. For the record, I also have the front section of the Orlando Sentinel from the Challenger explosion. We, as Americans, have an inherent need to soak up, if you will, current events and from a later perspective, to reinforce what then is in history books that our children and grandchildren use on an almost daily basis.
Roxann Holloway
