Can Redesigns Save Newspapers?

Philip M. Stone June 24, 2008

The Orlando Sentinel has gone and done it, The Chicago Tribune is to start doing it experimentally on Saturdays, and even the staid Wall Street Journal is at it. It’s almost as if they are taking their one-word cue from the US Presidential election – change.

In Orlando’s case, it’s a complete makeover. Readers of the new paper, launched Sunday, will not recognize it from the paper they received on Saturday. Big on lots of color, big graphics, big pictures, shorter stories. It’s really what USA Today threatened to be but never was.

The overriding question will be – is it a better read than before. Can changing style save the newspaper industry in these days when in Q1 alone advertising was down an average of 13% over the year before? The Sentinel is part of Sam Zell’s Tribune empire, the group says newspapers are too set in their ways and have to radically change – they need to do more self promotions, they need to take chances, they need to cut the mold. Whatever else you can say about today’s Sentinel, it certainly did all of that.

But will it work?   If a newspaper can change its ways, can its readers, too?  That answer won’t really come for at least a couple of months as the paper settles down to its new style – can it produce day in, day out what it did for its big Sunday launch? Too bad Kathleen Waltz, Sentinel publisher since June, 2000, quit in February so she won’t be around to convince those advertisers who knew and trusted her that this was a good Sentinel move.

Regular readers may recall that this writer’s 30-something son Kevan lives in Orlando and hasn’t bought a newspaper for the past 10 years. And even though he works on the University of Central Florida campus where the Sentinel is available for free, he gave up reading it a long time back. So persuading him to leave his 50-inch TV at home and go actually spend 75 cents for Monday’s edition took a lot of wisdom tooth pulling. The question that Dad wanted answered is whether son would read the makeover on a regular basis?

His response: “The paper looked hip, stylish, and colorful.  The stories, while smaller and concise, were pretty much the same.  As an avid sports and politics follower I dissected those sections first -- I may as well have been reading yesterday’s paper, but then again, that’s the problem all newspapers have in an age of internet and continuous live-streaming breaking news.

“If I was still in college and did a report on the new paper, it would basically say: 1) The graphics were loud and colorful, an obvious attempt to project a ‘hey!  Look at me’ response,  2) The content, though shorter, is the same and 3) The newspaper is still outdated about 5 minutes after it is dropped off the delivery truck.

“Unfortunately, issue number 3 remains the real problem. The Sentinel has obviously tried to boost its reader base with a new format.   The format is not the problem, it never has been.  The problem, not just with the Sentinel, but with newspapers in general, is that they cannot compete in a world that is fast paced, information rich, and saturated in opinion.  Many generations before me relied on the newspaper to tell who won a political election or sporting event.  Generations before me were introduced to the radio for breaking news.  A generation before me had the television to put pictures to the story.  My generation, as well as future generations, will be able to access information literally on demand, in full color, and then be able to, just as easily, get as many different viewpoints on that in a span of minutes.   How on earth does a newspaper, printed hours before, compete with that? 

“Today’s society is not one that relies on their city paper to educate them on what happened yesterday; we are a generation that insists upon immediate and detailed media that allows us to know news as it is happening.  It is for these reasons that the Sentinel, and papers everywhere,  can give themselves all the makeovers they wish to give, but at the end of the day the makeover will suffer the same result as the content within it -- it will be old news.”

So, still no sale to the 30-something!

There’s an old newspaper adage – change for the sake of change doesn’t work. An anonymous blogger has put it pretty succinctly, “As a former page designer or newsroom tech guy at three newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times, I'll repeat what I've been saying for 22 years: “1) New managers/owners always want to redesign because they think it will somehow fundamentally change the industry. They are wrong. (USA Today was a new design, but it was the abbreviated content that interested weary business travelers.) 2) Redesigns will get a consumer to pick up the paper a couple of times. If it's the same old content, all the benefits of the redesign are lost and now you've alienated the consumer even more, 3) NEVER redesign until after your content changes are in place, 4) Redesigns do not inject the work place with creativity. They inject it with tired, grousing employees who already had too much work to do. (Though employees would be happy to redesign the paper if the content really did change.)

Words from the old generation to be thrown away or words to the wise? There does seem to be plenty of evidence out there that design is not what readers find most important, what is most important is content. Alan Jacobson of Brass Tacks Design who saw prototypes of the new Sentinel wrote, “One need only examine the before-and-afters to see that no substantive changes have been made to story selection. In many cases, even headlines and photos remain the same. Time has proven that merely dressing up the same old content will not attract readers' eyes or advertisers' dollars for more than a few days.”

The Times of London was the most venerable broadsheet in the world. It went compact size (tabloid is a dirty word) in November, 2004 when its circulation stood at 660,906. Compact was considered to be the panacea to save UK newspaper circulation, and circulation did indeed get an initial bump, but today The Times’ circulation stands at 626,401, a 5% drop. Redesign defenders will say the loss would have been much more had the newspaper stayed a broadsheet, but the fact is the compact switch had the intent of raising the numbers, not see them go down.

Owner Rupert Murdoch explained in his April, 2005 speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors why The Times went compact. “At The Times of London, circulation decline was immediately reversed when we moved from a broadsheet to what we call our ‘compact’ edition. For nearly a year, we offered readers both versions: same newspaper, same stories, just different sizes. And they overwhelmingly chose the compact version as more convenient. This is an example of us listening to what our readers want, and then upsetting a centuries old tradition to give them exactly what they were asking for. And we did it all without compromising the quality of our product.” But for all that   three years later and the circulation is down.

But The Times’ editorial content remained basically the same, perhaps with shorter stories,  so is that where it fell down in its remake – not only should it have changed story length but also have paid more attention to the content it was actually providing. So if the venerable Times of London can change its ways then why not the Sentinel of Orlando? But did the Sentinel ask its readers what they wanted in the new edition and if so, is the newspaper giving them that, or rather something its chief innovation officer thinks the public wants?

Tribune chief innovation officer Lee Abrams says the new design “brings readers INTO the content, but the real story is in the content itself. It's smart but unconventional. For example, on the front page, they not only LOOK like modern Orlando, but the content itself, right down to the details necessary to compete in today's CNN/FOX/ESPN world are there."

Since Zell’s managers have said they want to reduce the news hole and since the newspaper is using much bigger graphics and pictures it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that means a lot less room for text. So even if the stories are shorter, will the same ground be covered but in shorter takes or is this a convenient way of declaring there are too many journalists/beats for the remaining text news hole?

The Sentinel is but the first of the Tribune newspapers to undergo such a makeover. And it is obvious from a memo from Chicago Tribune editor Ann Marie Lipinski that things are being done there in triple time – “We are committed to determining the basic architecture and sectioning of the paper within 30 days; deciding on paging (how many and where) within 45 days; understanding our staffing levels throughout the paper in 60 days; and being ready to launch a rethought and redesigned Tribune within 90 days in mid-September.”

Away from Tribune and there are changes afoot at the Wall Street Journal, and they are concentrated not so  much on how the paper looks – but that will probably change --  but rather its content.  Already some changes are obvious – shorter news stories, more general news, four more pages daily of international news -- all of those changes aimed at readers of the New York Times. The WSJ wants to broaden its readership so it is not just read by business executives but rather by what News Corp Chief Operating Officer Peter Chernin calls the “money classes”. But Murdoch’s goal is very clear as he told a conference last week, “I want to make the paper the best in the world.”

Robert Thomson, WSJ managing editor and the man who  was editor of the Times of London when it went compact – no foe he then of change – told a conference last week that newspapers eventually must rely on digital revenue to replace the decline in newspaper readership, and that is the key to a newspaper’s future success.  But he doesn’t think it is purely by chance that the WSJ is increasing its print readership.

“As long as you have a body of trustworthy, high quality content the user will find you,” Thomson said. Maybe that’s advice that Lee Abrams and company at Tribune should take on board, too -- its not so important how you display that information, or how you promote yourself, what is most important is content -- and if you don’t have that at the level your readers want then you won’t have your readers.

As Kevan Stone wrote, “the Sentinel, and papers everywhere,  can give themselves all the makeovers they wish to give, but at the end of the day the makeover will suffer the same result as the content within it -- it will be old news.”