Brass Tacks Design

Two media titans with world-famous flagship newspapers – Tribune and The New York Times Company – are pursuing pairs of redesigns in Florida. But that's where the similarities end.

Tribune's cutting-edge redesigns put radically different faces on its papers in Orlando and Ft. Lauderdale. In contrast, NYT's planned redesigns in Ocala and Gainesville emphasize story selection, headline writing and photo usage. Tribune's designs are dazzling. NYT's are not – its redesigns are traditional yet clean. By reducing the number of design elements, NYT plans to streamline page production so editors have more time for editing.

So which approach matters more to Floridians – and Florida publishers?

Very few redesigns boost revenue. Even fewer boost readership. But when they do, they do it instantly, so there's no need to take a wait-and-see attitude before evaluating.

It's always a challenge to deliver bottom-line results, so it may have been unreasonable to expect Orlando's redesign to impact either of these metrics. But it isn't unreasonable to expect a redesign to register a reaction, even if it doesn't yield results. However, based on the limited response to Orlando's effort, readers weren't moved by its new look.

The Sentinel's smart, sexy, sophisticated redesign started off with a bang in June. But strip off the stylized section flags from August's editions and you'll see that the new Sentinel looks and reads much like the old Sentinel, in part because its labor-intensive redesign was too difficult to support with a staff that was cut weeks after the design was launched (an unfortunate event its designers could not have anticipated.)

Compare the front-page prototype with the front page published on August 22, 2008. Note that the published page is quite conventional, other than the nameplate. Also note that the headlines and stories on the published front are quite typical of most American newspapers. These choices do not reflect the new thinking in story selection and headline writing displayed in the prototype.

This week, Tribune debuted another redesign: a reinvented SunSentinel in Ft. Lauderdale. It produced just a fraction of the comments of Orlando's redesign.

Readers didn't love it. Readers didn't hate it. They just didn't care. But don't blame the designers who developed a powerful, beautiful, flexible format for the Sentinel's content.

Look closely at the Sun-Sentinel's before-and-afters. You'll see that the stories, headlines and photos rarely change from old design to new design. Here are examples from the Local, Sports, Outlook and Lifestyle sections. This is not the kind of reinvention that matters to readers.

The pages are filled with images and promos. Conspicuous by its absence is text – and here's why that's a problem:

The people we're trying to reach are called readers for a reason: because they read. But there is precious little to read on these pages. With pages getting narrower, and fewer of them to print upon, newspapers cannot afford to squander space on oversized clip art as seen in the prototypes.

The Sentinel's marketing message was "FAST AND FOCUSED." But "LOOKS GREAT, LESS FILLING" might have been more accurate.

A redesign is a tremendous marketing opportunity. But you don't get a second chance to make a first impression. Newspapers should test their redesigns with readers before deploying them. The SunSentinel had 90 days to complete its redesign. This provided ample time for testing, based on other transformative redesigns that managed to include testing within much smaller launch windows.

Redesigns in Ocala and Gainesville won't appear until November. Until then, the jury's still out on the better design approach. But the evidence we have today, courtesy of Tribune, indicates that newspapers need to change more than cosmetics to make a substantive difference.