Monday, April 05, 2010

Pages good for USAT, but here's the downside

"USAT pages in the local Gannett papers are not styled to match the local papers. They stick out like a sore thumb."

-- Anonymous@2:31 p.m., commenting on Corporate's encouraging the community papers to publish pages produced by USA Today, devoted to world and national news, plus major league baseball.

9 comments:

  1. I don't think readers care about stuff like this. Newspaper editors have always put way too much stock in design and consistency of style. Most readers are not trained to look for things like consistency in style -- design or otherwise.

    In other words, it won't matter that much if a writer spells out the number ten when it should be 10. Readers will, however, notice if you speel it "tin."

    Same goes for design. The average person will notice if it's really bad but probably won't care if it just lacks consistency from page to page. It's journalists and graphic designers who get upset about stuff like this.

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  2. I've had readers tell me 1) they aren't happy the national/international news isn't tailored for the area audience and 2) they don't like the way the page looks different from the rest of the paper.

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  3. OK, here is something readers DO care about: All the times listed on the USA Today baseball page are Eastern. That doesn't play well here in the Midwest, nor will it in the Mountain and Pacific time zones if Gannett papers there are forced to run it.

    Typical Gannett corporate-think: If it's good enough for us here in the Crystal Palace, it is more than good enough for the unwashed hordes in the rest of the country.

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  4. An editor or publisher with any integrity will not give up control of content to any other publication. And a CEO with any integrity wouldn't ask them to.

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  5. I work in Wilmington, which frequently localizes national wire copy for A1 stories, especially with the editors sucking up to Joe Biden every chance they get. (Only a slight exaggeration: "Hey, Biden farted! Got to do a local version! Let's go to the train station and talk to real people about flatulence, and ask whether he's still the same old Joe now that he's passing gas!") A USAT page wouldn't make a bit of sense.

    Even for smaller papers, it would prevent them from sticking the big story of the day on A1, or even adding in local congresscritters' voices to a wire piece on health care, for example. Dumb, dumb, dumb.

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  6. If corporate is going to force this stuff on the community papers, they need to either get every paper on a standard set of body and headline fonts or allow editors to make tweaks. That'd also solve the time zone problem.

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  7. Newspapers have foolishly given up on their quest to provide top-notch design for readers. Despite the fact that some feel "good is good enough," readers do appreciate great design. Why doesn't Gannett just mandate that all of the papers use USAT styles? Then, it wouldn't be a big deal. Why don't they just have CCI create a "lite" web-based version that all the papers use? It would make sharing easier. Honestly, I never understood why they just didn't create 5 or 6 templates that everyone could use. This approach would make it cheaper to produce newspapers because the jobs of those wasting time repeatedly designing the same dull pages could easily be sent to India or China for cheaper production. Why not?

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  8. There's no "encouraging" this page's use. It's a mandate, and yet another reason I find it more and more difficult to defend Gannett against what is a deservedly bad reputation.

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  9. A couple points about the USA Today mandates. I saw the FAQs and an e-mail from Marymont. We're not to change anything on the nation/world page, even if we see a mistake! We're supposed to call and have them fix it. I guess it depends on how bad the mistake is for me to waste time calling and having them resend the page.
    As a longtime copy editor I also have issues with the headlines. They abbreviate way too many words and it looks clunky, and the heds don't always fill out the columns. (At least we were able to fix these things when we ran the ContentOne nation/world page for the past few years.)

    And the USAT page runs first-day heds on second day folos, which has always irritated me. How long does it take to write a brief hed that reflects the new info in the story?

    As far as recreating the fonts -- they actually have their own font that no one else can use. It's Gulliver and licensed only to USA Today.

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