
Can design save the newspaper?  - makimaki
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/jacek_utko_asks_can_design_save_the_newspaper.html
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markessien
Imagine the web came before the newspaper, and you were an investor. Then
someone came to you and pitched you : I'll take the best stuff on the web,
print it daily on paper in factories, transport it all over the country in the
night, then sell it for the price of a cup of coffee. I'll also hire a bunch
of expensive writers to write quality content, and I'll also make that content
available for free on the website so as to make people want to buy the paper.

Would you invest?

~~~
antiismist
If you watched the video then you'd know that the designer did a great job of
integrating the content into the design of the newspaper. It isn't a copy-
paste job. There was design and layout and graphics that you just can't do on
the web, and he demonstrated that people like it.

So if you change the question to, would you invest in a designer who had a
track record of boosting circulation by 20-100% in two years time?

~~~
blhack
Did he call it a magazine?

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tjic
Can interpretive dance save NASA?

~~~
sho
That was unfairly modded down IMO.

TED is great in its way, but it caters to, some would say flatters, an elite
crowd of people - the type who buy expensive artwork for their houses - some
of the stuff proposed there might sound great to the chardonnay-class
participants but has little relevance in the real world.

Can design save the newspaper? Of course not, and merely raising the question
with a straight face impressively demonstrates the out-of-touch, ivory tower,
art-gallery-opening-attending disconnect of the speaker.

Such a question is, in my opinion, at least as _prima facie_ ridiculous as
posing that interpretive dance might save NASA, so the parent's comment is an
entirely valid _reductio ad absurdum_.

~~~
h34t
In what way is the speaker out-of-touch? He has personally overseen
circulation improvements of ~ 30 - 100% in the newspapers he has redesigned.

"Design" in this sense goes far beyond "graphic embellishment" and is actually
about changing the entire product/company involved -- and thus very relevant
to the future of newspapers.

A few quotes from his speech:

"It was my personal, intimate challenge to talk to the readers."

"the changes we made were not about changing the look, it was about changing
the product completely"

"my bosses wondered, why is he asking all these business questions, why is he
not showing us pages? This is the new role of the designer, to be in this
process from the beginning to end."

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halo
No. British broadsheet The Guardian had a high-profile redesign in 2005 which
shifted the newspaper away from the traditional broadsheet into a full-colour
Berliner, and soon after the paper won multiple design awards and their
circulation has increased while the rest of the industry has contracted.
However, the devil is in the details: the newspaper has continued to make
large operating losses (£26.4m this year compared to £15.9m last) and
continues to be propped up by other businesses in the group.

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mrduncan
I think the real problem in a lot of cases is that newspapers are trying to be
something that they simply can't. They are trying to give you up to the minute
news, but logistically you aren't going to receive it until the next day. They
simply can't compete with the web for breaking news. Where I think they can
win though is with relevant and in-depth reporting on stories which you won't
see on the internet (and not just printing half of the AP feed either).

~~~
justindz
Yep. I think they need to come a little late to the table with WAY more
substance and to follow scandals a month later with serious indictments. Let
the net build the buzz before the big reporting and then spread the news and
discussion after the big reporting. A good complement.

Decided to follow up on my blog with a vignette:
[http://justindz.tumblr.com/post/91601837/this-is-sam-he-
work...](http://justindz.tumblr.com/post/91601837/this-is-sam-he-works-at-the-
miami-tortoise)

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kaens
I can't watch the video right now, but I do have a question:

Why would we want to save the newspaper?

~~~
mynameishere
Newspapers still do the bulk of the workaday journalism, which is the raw
material of almost all "news" in TV and the internet. CNN will still be able
to cover national topics in the future, but local stuff will go uncovered. I
predict increased municipal corruption throughout.

~~~
derefr
Newspapers _themselves_ don't do journalism; newspaper journalists do. The
journalists who write for newspapers will still exist, and still write what
they write, if newspapers die out; their content will just be converted to,
and paid for by, a different part of the media.

~~~
pclark
err... how will they be paid for?

~~~
jerf
Capitalism. This is the magic of capitalism. There's demand for journalism on
one side and supply on the other, and if there's a profitable way to bring
them together, it will be found. Newspapers can stand in the way of that by
constraining what people think of.

You don't know how it will be done. I don't know how it will be done. But
nevertheless, similar miracles happen every day; there are _millions_ of
examples of this sort of thing occurring, it is not the exception. One of the
most intriguing things about markets is that they can be smarter than any
given participant. (This is part of why they can become hard to regulate; they
are as good at outsmarting regulation as evolved programs can be, in much the
same way.) Bounding what the market is capable of by your comprehension or
your credulity is not the path to understanding.

In truth, it is not that there is no possible way to bring them together, the
problem is that there are a _staggering_ number of ways to bring the supply
and demand together and nobody knows what is best. It seems unlikely that
newspapers are the answer, though.

~~~
Adam503
The "magic" of unregulated capitalism brought us Fox "News" and the economic
collapse we are currently experiencing.

Unregulated capitalism is an extremist form of economic system. There are no
answers to be found in extremism.

The answers to our problems will found somewhere in the middle of the range
between unregulated capitalism on one extreme end of the spectrum and
socialist economics at the other extreme end of the spectrum.

Government oversight of markets. Elimination of monopolies. A voice for the
employees. etc. In this case, there will probably be some donated money and
some government money going to a public journalism system similar to public
broadcasting.

~~~
jerf
You miss my point entirely. You can only conceive of the old system going, so
you want to get the government to fund it. But there's another way: Let the
market figure something out.

Governments can't do new things. They usually can't conceive of them, and if
they can, they can't get them past committee.

The old system isn't working. Pouring more government money into it has no
realistic prospect of working. For one thing, how can the "fourth estate"
function as a watchdog if they're getting too much of their money from the
people they're supposed to be watching? Your only hope of something that
actually works is a truly new system, and the government can't come up with
that.

But the market can, even if you can't think of what that may be and if I can't
think of what it may be. It's not blind faith, _every_ niche works that way.
The government did not create the auto industry. The government did not create
the electronics industry; it did not create the RAM industry or the CPU
industry or the video card industry. It did not create the insurance industry,
it did not create the furniture industry. It did not create just-in-time
delivery or Amazon.com. These all came from supply on one side figuring out
how to reach demand on the other, with all sort of creative chaos in the
middle (and ongoing) that could never have been legislated into existence. (It
can, on the other hand, be legislated _out_ of existence.)

Why should the government prop up the current system instead of letting
something new happen?

Nothing in my post had anything to do with "unregulated capitalism". It's
simply how the economy works, and without this critical understanding, not
only can you not go forward, you can not understand how we got where we are.

~~~
Adam503
"letting the market figure it out" is unregulated capitalism. Unregulated
capitalism is exactly the extremist economic policy nonsense that created the
mess we are in. When Bush eliminated most of the regulation on the financial
services industry, what that "let the market figure out" is that it is very,
very easy to steal money when there is little regulation.

Libertarian economics policy advocates utterly fail to recognize that when
money is laying around with no regulations/regulators protecting that money,
people steal that money.

I don't know why libertarians can't figure out people steal money that is left
around unguarded, but they just don't comprehend that fact.

~~~
anamax
> When Bush eliminated most of the regulation on the financial services
> industry

Since Bush did no such thing....

> Libertarian economics policy advocates utterly fail to recognize that when
> money is laying around with no regulations/regulators protecting that money,
> people steal that money.

Libertarians recognize that govts don't protect money all that well and that
big thefts always involve a govt.

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petercooper
Fancy checking out a PDF conversion of the newspaper that was featured in this
video..? I found a copy at
<http://rapidshare.com/files/142517365/pb.04.09.08.pdf> \- I'd mirror it, but
even though I'm sure they'd love for people to check out their newspaper, it's
just too risky legally.

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josefresco
In an industry that worships smart engineers this is pretty refreshing. I am
biased being a designer but it's still a good watch for you Hackers and also a
lesson for the newspaper industry (Hint: death is coming).

~~~
noodle
are you talking about the tech industry?

as an engineer/hacker, i think its pretty clear that design is important. its
cold, hard facts that people like something that is visually appealing. the
issue is, though, that this is a community of hackers, and so we're all mostly
poor at artistic design, nor are we particularly interested in it, so we don't
talk about it.

its definitely interesting, and this meshes well with the community because
its a discussion on the numbers of how design works.

just my $0.02, though

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misuba
It's been a few weeks now since the Seattle P-I went web only. Anyone else
notice how there were lots of news stories about that change, and now nothing?

Reporters aren't even interested. They just believe that going to the web
equals death.

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mhb
Donation-funded reporting: <http://spot.us/>

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iuguy
No.

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TweedHeads
Newspapers must drop the 'paper' from their name and embrace the web. Profit
can come from diferent ways, like ads, classifieds, job boards, obituaries,
etc.

