Yesterday night, the whole country was watching Michelle Obama on TV.
It was a terrific show.
What readers want to know today is not more about the speech, but more about the woman, daughter, sister, mother, wife and lawyer …
But the new Baltimore Sun opens its front page with a big picture of a mail box.
And the new Sun-Sentinel does the same with a health story and a big illustration.
Do they still have an art director after the changes?
Do they have a photo editor?
Well, this is the end of these failed re-inventions.
The reality, darling, is that Michelle Obama sells and Ted Kennedy does, too.
They connect with the American public.
So, after widespread TV exposure, the circulation of print newspapers will go wild.
Except in Baltimore and Fort Lauderdale.
Or in Denver, where the local tabloid forgets the convention and goes to Pakistan.
Yes, to Pakistan!
Others did much better, and can expect better sales:
By jaysmall - Aug 26, 2008 | Leave a reply
Juan Antonio,
I might be mistaken (would not be the first time), but I believe the Rocky Mountain News is doing special wraparound sections for DNC coverage. What you might be seeing here is the front page inside that wrapper. Knowing the resources the Rocky has devoted to the coverage, I’m quite sure the paper would not completely ignore the convention on its front.
Your points on the other fronts are, as usual, excellent.
Thanks,
Jay Small
By Juan Antonio Giner - Aug 26, 2008 | Leave a reply
Thanks Jay, and I hope the same!
By John - Aug 26, 2008 | Leave a reply
As one who could care less about the political theater (that’s all the conventions are, after all — heavily orchestrated shows where all the party bigwigs go to great lengths to slap themselves on the back), I’m having a hard time faulting the two papers for not leading with the convention. Plus, it’s the first night. There are still plenty of opportunities, especially Hillary’s speech) for a blowout of the convention on all the front pages, including Baltimore and Ft. Lauderdale.
Gen. Patton was once quoted as saying, “If everyone is thinking alike, then someone isn’t thinking.” Just because you know every other paper in the nation is leading with the convention, that doesn’t mean you have to. I agree the content carries the design and the paper, but it’s entirely possible that the decision was made to take the road less traveled, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
Plus, with copy desks staffed as they are, especially in Tribune newsrooms, I’m sure it was much easier to go with the feature-ish centerpieces, give a heavy tease to the convention and go big with it inside rather than lead with it and then have to scramble on deadline.
Just my 2 cents, and I appreciate the opportunity to share my thoughts. Thanks!
By Juan Antonio Giner - Aug 26, 2008 | Leave a reply
Thank you, John.
I understand your point.
The problem is that you can be different every day, but no the day that a black woman speaks in a national convention that is going to nominate her husban candidate for President of the country.
It’s too much.
These were trivial stories that dind’t deserve the front page.
A newspaper, old or new, needs to tell the readers what’s important.
And not banal stories.
Readers will tell us if I am wrong or not.
My impression is that soft-news newspapers will die faster than hard-news ones.
By davisull - Aug 27, 2008 | Leave a reply
Juan,
Your main point is valid but I think a distinction has to be made between Lauderdale and Baltimore. The Sun-Sentinel’s program has been to have the top two or three breaking news headlines at the top of the page, then have a centerpiece based on non-breaking news as the main element. This type of design harks back in some ways to Chicago and West Coast street-sale dailies of the 1940s and 1950s, where there would be four or five headlines bunched up at the top of the page, then the flag, then the stories … somewhere on the page. Fort Lauderdale’s may be a questionable design, but in this case Obama gets the lead headline and the centerpiece is on hospital care, which is always a big story in Florida given its age demographics. Their news judgment has logic.
Baltimore, on the other hand, seems simply to have laid out the page three days in advance. Oh, here’s Michelle, down in the corner. And that mailbox surely is an exciting photo, wow. But what is one to do when we are told, “Everyone will have seen Obama already and no one will care and all anyone buys the paper for now is local news?” I’m sure the story talks to angry seniors who have been walking to the mailbox at the corner of Charles and North for 40 years every Monday to mail their bills and now will — gasp — have to change, and they will say things like “I know things have to change, I just don’t see why they have to change here. Every Monday I stop by on Bob’s porch on the way to the box. It’s the wrong change at the wrong place.” You can’t win for losing in this case. It’s the story that no one else probably has that is supposed to affect people’s lives. It’s what they are told will save newspapers.