Newspaper Design: Best Front Design: The Kansas City Star

CREATED BY
BRASS TACKS DESIGN

11.21.08

What makes this page a BFD: A unified page of disparate elements

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We've been overrun with stock market fever charts lately. The photo on the front of the Rocky Mountain News does a better job of showing the human toll of the recession.

Bolt took a bite out of Bakersfield. Try saying tbt's lead headline six times fast.

The SunSentinel had one of the boldest visual makeovers in recent memory, and its stylized nameplate may be the most original in the country, but it seems kinda lost on today's front page – appearing more like a logo for the one-col. story than the brand for the entire product. However, the SunSentinel made good use of red and yellow to unify the page, as Kansas City used black, blue and yellow to similar effect.

The Chicago Sun-Times continues to experiment with its nameplate on almost a daily basis. Today, it became part of a headline.

Today's Detroit News was similar to yesterday's, but better with stylized crops on more expressive photos. This dramatic use of images made it better than today's Detroit Free Press.

The newspaper with the best front design today is The Kansas City Star for effective use of several bold elements that worked together.

"The whole is greater than the sum of its parts" – that's the best way to describe KC today. Its Twilight promo, black-on-yellow headline and United Way photo all worked together nicely.

The elements were very different, but the use of black, blue and yellow throughout pulled them together for one effective page.

On the other side of the Show Me State, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch also had a strong Twilight promo, but the rest of the page didn't come together with the visual impact of KC's.

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Repowering newspapers: Taking a lesson from Toyota and GM

The American newspaper industry is in crisis. So is the American auto industry. Both are victims of secular changes, which have been exacerbated by the current economic crisis.

In two of his recent books, NYT's Thomas Friedman quotes Stanford economist Paul Romer: "A crisis is a terrible thing to waste." So let's get to it:

The solution for both industries is remarkably similar: both automakers and publishers need to repower their vehicles with new engines.

Detroit still depends upon dinosaurs for the fossil fuels that power its engines. To survive, automakers must evolve by re-engineering their vehicles. Detroit must deliver cars powered by electricity derived from new, greener sources. This will restore domestic jobs, boost the economy and improve the planet – providing an elegant solution to all three problems.

With Toyota's Prius and Chevy's Volt, America's automakers are offering a new kind of vehicle – an electric car. Now publishers need to deliver a new kind of news vehicle – the electric newspaper.

What's that? Newspapers already have an electric vehicle? Not really.

More than a century ago, stagecoach makers realized they needed to repower their horse-drawn carriages. Some chose steam to power their new vehicles. A decade ago, newspapers chose monolithic, shovelware-based, audience-driven websites to power their new(s) vehicles. Both chose the wrong engine.

The engine that drives newspapers – both print and online – is ad revenue, not audience. And like Detroit, which is replacing internal combustion engines with electric motors, we need to replace our spuriously named, unique visitor engines with the only metric that matters – money. Here's why:

American democracy depends upon a well-informed public. See Jefferson, Thomas. Today, only newspapers have the means to meet this need, and newspapers need ad revenue from print – and increasingly from online – to continue to power this essential journalisitc function.

There's more at stake than newspapers and journalists' jobs. So we gotta get real. Real fast. (See why that's such a big challenge, at bottom.)

First, we gotta let go of our Stanley Steamers (a.k.a. newspaper websites) that haven't produced more than ten percent of any newspaper's total revenue since they were launched more than a decade ago. These meager revenues are actually inflated because they don't account for costs borne by the print side: newsgathering by the editorial staff and sales of classifieds by the ad staff. So the weak revenues are actually weaker than they appear.

Bottom line? These sites will never contribute enough to the bottom line to take up the slack from print. It's time for something completely different. Automakers like Toyota and GM are trying something new. Here's a new deal for newspaper sites:

Repower online sites with revenue as the number one goal. Audience will take care of itself if we deliver an entirely new enduser experience for editorial and advertising content.
Repower the pricing model (CPM) and adopt the CPC (cost-per-click) pricing model, which made Google the number one advertising company in the world (Market cap: $160 billion).
Repower the online offerings to include email marketing. If search is the killer app of online, then email is the killer advertising app of online.

Repower with UGC (user-generated content). With all the newsroom staff cuts, there are fewer of us everyday. But users are almost limitless and virtually everywhere to extend our gathering of information. If users contribute, they also become part of the audience that we deliver to advertisers.
Repower online products to make them more effective environments for advertising and to make their content more relevant to endusers.
Repower the online offerings. Your website can't succeed as an online version of your newspaper. As Mark Potts has explained, online is about niches. You're more likely to be successful with 100 niche sites that leverage the same platform and database, rather than a single, one-size-fits-all, electronic version of your newspaper.
Think about the next source of energy: Mobile. Very soon, mobile will eclipse laptops and desktops. Repower your newly energized news and advertising products and services for the mobile platform.

Putting this plan into action won't be easy. Experience has shown that newspaper execs are reluctant to make substantive changes to the print product. Online execs are even more entrenched. Here's what turnaround experts told 50 newspaper execs convened by the American Press Institute this week, "The biggest hurdles to progress are the industry's senior leadership, including some of the people in this room. I am not sure you can take a look at your industry with fresh eyes. Success often takes an outsider to come in and shake things up."

Step one: Get some outside help.

Step two: Prepare to have fun for the first time in a long time.