Redesign Reax

Great post here from Andy Bechtel on common reader reactions to newspaper redesigns. A recurring theme: It looks too much like USA Today. Very funny.

Redesigns are hardly a panacea for newspaper problems--especially not if the underlying content isn't significantly rethought as well--but editors tend to overreact to criticism from a handful of readers. The heck with USA Today--if anything, most redesigns simply don't go far enough. And that goes double for online site redesigns, where most newspapers are still stuck way back in the last decade.

Comments

[JD Mullane]

Redesign, shmedesign. It's about content, and boy do we professional journos know what readers want.
Read the front page/local page of any daily and you learn that readers are fascinated with government news -- every burp and fart of the city council, every school board meeting, county supervisors meetings, etc. Meetings, meetings, meetings.
Each February, readers want Black History Month stories -- every day, if possible. Does someone in the community claim to have been at Dr. King's 1963 "Dream" speech? Play it big -- even if the clips show the paper's interviewed the dude three times before on the same story.
If a woman in the community is the first at anything -- first cop, first town manager, first to own her own Bertucci's franchise -- readers want it on the front page.
If a local school introduces a new "diversity" program, it's 1A -- because readers can't get enough of diversity issues. They're obsessed with it. Diversity rules -- unless there are five American soldiers killed in Iraq, then diversity gets bumped below the fold.
During elections readers want polls, polls, polls. Who's up, who's down. Horse race stuff. They crave it.
Readers love long "issue" stories, too, and expect within these stories quotes from "experts" and government bureaucrats they've never heard of -- particularly if the experts are college professors, and if the bureaucrats have official sounding titles.
If one of these experts/bureaucrats says that women, children or the poor will be "hardest hit," then it goes 1A Sunday, because that's what readers want.
During heat waves, readers love to read how hot it is, day after day.
Readers can't get enough of car crash and building fire photos, either. You can't go wrong playing these big, especially if the Monday story budget is a bit thin.
Newspaper circulation continues to make robust gains because we professionally trained journalists know what our readers want.