Looking Good in Berlin, Frankfurt and New York
The Society for News Design has declared the German papers der Freitag of Berlin and Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, and The New York Times, to be the World’s Best-Designed in this year’s “The Best of News Design” Creative Competition.
Meeting at Syracuse University in New York, an international panel of judges selected the papers from among hundreds of entries worldwide. The judges evaluated issues published in 2009.
Full details here:
http://www.snd.org/2010/02/three-judged-snd-worlds-best-designed/
“The reality of distress in our business is obvious. There are many signs of
reduced resources, including smaller news holes with crowded words, less
local news, an abundance of feature stories on the front page, a continued
shortage of good photojournalism and more use of stock illustration. An
overall feeling of looking a little confused and perhaps a bit stuck,
prevails.“But wait. The good news is that far from going away or giving up, we saw
much earnest effort towards reinvention.” — the judges
SND’s 31st Annual Creative Competition drew more than 10,000 entries and had more than 1,000 winners.
Database of all results: http://office.snd.org/competitions/contest31.lasso
NYTimes leads multimedia design awards
The Best of Multimedia Design 2009 winners include two gold, two silver awards and seven awards of excellence for NewYorkTimes.com.
A Judges’ Special Recognition Award also went to nytimes.com, “to acknowledge their work in raising the bar for special events coverage with Election 2008,” according to the SND citation.
Among the Times winners:
* Choosing a President (gold award)
* You Finish, You Win (gold award)
* One in 8 Million (silver award)
* Tracking US Airways Flight 1549 (silver award)
Other silver awards went to:
* Andaman Rising carolinaphotojournalism.org
* Hurricane Tracker msnbc.com
* Indy 500 Car Tracker indystar.com
* Ted Kennedy boston.com
For the full list of winners, and judges’ comments, see SND Update: The Best of Multimedia Design Winners
If Only Hunter Could Be There
Event-design as Rorschach test… Am I the only one who mistook the jagged white Rocky Mountain profile ranging through next year’s AEJMC Convention logo for an optimistic graph of media industries’ ups and downs, showing a slight upturn on the right? On second thought, the line looks exciting, dangerous and cracked, which reminds me of someone…
Getting a crowd of journalism educators together in Hunter Thompson territory in August could be a lot of fun. I hope I can attend… (I hope anyone can attend, given the state of academic travel budgets, if my own institution is any indicator.)
Thinking of Hunter inspired a rewrite of this post and gave me a panel discussion idea for the event: “Going Gonzo: From Uncle Duke to Johnny Depp, how do journalism faculty and today’s students deal with Hunter S. Thompson‘s legacy?” He’s in my students’ textbook, on a page headed, Journalism heroes, legends and folklore. He’s relevant to bloggers and skeptics, rebels and iconoclasts, lefties — and libertarian lovers of recreational firearms.
So let’s make that a discussion question for any journalism educators who see this post: How DO you treat Hunter Thompson in your classes? Is he in the textbook you use? (In my case, it’s a “yes” for Tim Harrower’s Inside Reporting.) Is he discussed in writing classes? In magazine classes? Reporting classes? History classes? Ethics classes? Do students read him? What do they think?
