Society for News Design launches new design
The Society for News Design has an updated website for the new year, pledging to be “a dynamic representation of our evolving organization… inclusive… multi-platform… aggressively forward-looking,” according to SND President Kris Viesselman’s announcement.
In the inclusiveness department, SND’s former “Best of Newspaper Design™” competition changed its name last year to the “Best of News Design™” Creative Competition and opened the competition to all magazines, not just newspaper Sunday supplements.
(Presumably all entries for this year’s competition are on their way to Syracuse, since they are due Wednesday. Entries from outside the U.S. are accepted for another week.)
SND has a separate Multimedia Design competition, with quarterly and annual awards. Newspapers’ Web sites (The New York Times in particular) led last year’s honorees.
For this month, the new SND site features a “Designing the next decade” video interview with Roger Black (transcript included), an interview with programmer-journalist Adrian Holovaty of Everyblock.com, and a survey of newspaper and magazine presentations reviewing the past decade, “Finding some heroes of the ‘Zeros’ coverage.”
The main SND site now incorporates SND’s Update blog; also see the SNDEast blog by Lee Steele, design editor of the Connecticut Post and Region 1 SND director.
Picturing the industry
It’s been floating around the net for almost a month, but if you haven’t seen it and need an infographic to make clear the state of the traditional newspaper biz to anyone, try this picture from Mint.com, a financial-management website. The original is 1100×2001 pixels, if you’re counting, big enough to see the sad details.
Extra points to the copydesk veterans who catch the biggest error in the multi-part graphic, or for adding comments to this post to point out specific pages at NAA, Bloomberg, or elsewhere, with the graphic’s source statistics.
The accompanying blog post is here, with discussion, including at least one eagle-eyed reader’s comment on a “do the math!” error of the sort we try to impress on beginning reporters and editors:
http://www.mint.com/blog/trends/the-death-of-the-newspaper/
If you don’t mind the distraction of discouraging news, you might use the graphic as a math-literacy teaching tool, with a hat-tip to Joe Murphy of the Denver Post for catching the error. Not much of a silver lining, but…
Loosely related (and some more-optimistic) items, rather than have an depressing block of white space next to the long, tall depressing graphic:
- Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy (Oct. 2009) report: Informing Communities Sustaining Democracy in the Digital Age
- Dan McDonough Jr. and Alan Bauer (May 2009) in The Christian Science Monitor, A newspaper business model that’s working.
- Paul Starr in The New Republic (March 2009), Goodbye to the Age of Newspapers (Hello to a new era of corruption)
- Walter Isaacson (Feb. 2009) in Time, How to Save Your Newspaper.
- Eric Alterman (2008), in The New Yorker, on Out of Print: The Death and Life of an American Newspaper.
- NAA Presstime Blog
