The Retch got this sneak peek at the newly redesigned Baltimore Sun. The "reinvention" debuts on Aug. 24. The new Sun will have only three sections: News, Sports and Features. The features sections will be themed with daily "adjacencies" like Health, Digital and Food. So new. So cutting edge. Sam, are you sure you're paying Lee Abrams enough?
The Orlando Sentinel is tarted up like a Cirque De Soleil acrobat. Now the Sun. Chicago is soon to follow. How soon til the Los Angeles Times goes under the knife?
Full details follow
Severance Negotiations Conclusion
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Severance Negotiations Conclusion
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1 week ago
4 comments:
that looks like a pile of dick.
Only several years ago The Sun labored for much of an entire year to do a redesign and paid hundreds of thousands to design guru Lucie Lacava to make it one of the nation's ugliest and most poorly conceived newspapers. And here they go again, redesigning the paper no sooner than readers get used to the color coding of section heads (as if they are too ignorant to see the section hed as Sports, or Maryland, etc), but this time they're pooping it in the matter of weeks, not months. This is totally going to be a journalistic abortion at the hands of designers gone wild. They don't seem to understand that if newspapers would go back to doing what they do best, and do it with clean and uncluttered design (would an iPod be so popular if it wasn't simple, smooth and clean?), that MAYBE we'd start to rebuild readership. The biggest problem the Sun faces is that it has little respect and trust from the readership thanks to a huge lack of diversity in the newsroom. The newsroom, especially the management team, all of whom are white, mostly male, does not reflect the local community culturally and ethnically and therefore are completely disconnected from the community they try to "cover." No redesign can fix the loss of trust the Sun has suffered in its own neighborhood.
"This is totally going to be a journalistic abortion at the hands of designers gone wild."
No, not designers. People like Lee Abrams and his ilk who wouldn't know good design if it bit him in the ass.
The idea of making a newspaper look like a Web site is just as asinine as making a Web site look like a newspaper!
Far too many newsroom managers with no design talent or background long ago drank the Mario Garcia "points of entry" Kool-Aid and have gone of the fucking deep end. That shit needs to stop.
Strong, simple, large visuals, headlines that clearly point out the lead story are and always will be the way to entice readers. The more noisy widgets on the page, the more likely people will get distracted and put the paper back in the rack at Starbucks and walk out the door.
"The idea of making a newspaper look like a Web site is just as asinine as making a Web site look like a newspaper!"
A-fucking-men.
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