Small Newspaper Design

(Back on board after a brief -- too brief -- vacation)

A problem exists in the world of newspaper design. It is a "size matters" issue.

The Society for News Design (a fine organization and I have been a member for 20 years) focuses on mostly large dailies. It has made efforts to deal with smaller newspapers and their design issues, but generally the big (circulation) dogs run the show. The annual SND publication of award winners is largely inhabited by the large circulation papers. It features work that simply cannot be duplicated by smaller dailies and certainly not by weeklies. Yet the vast majority of newspapers in this country fit in those categories.

Those newspapers probably need more help on design and typography than do the larger papers, yet less is available. The small paper newsworkers are almost exclusively trained in journalism schools, where little visual communication is taught. Large papers have graphic editors, even art directors. Small papers have an overworked photographer and mostly self-trained writers (Hey, Ed, you will be taking over page layout, starting next Tuesday....).

A new web site called News University (http://www.newsu.org) -- a joint venture of the Knight Foundation and The Poynter Institute -- is a great idea, but it still offers nothing (yet?) on design issues for smaller papers.

What if small papers got together, created a version of SND's competition for themselves, and used the small entry fees partly to cover the cost of the judging and partly to fund a web training site that would actually be helpful for them? Most of the lessons/problems could be set up by talented small paper newsworkers and design professors. Hmm. I might just do it.

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