Galley Pages (click to enlarge)
Printed at Size
A Paper?
Digital is dying.
The demand of instant information on the internet funnels topic coverage, and most publications are covering the same pool of information. Whether it’s news, entertainment, the economy, or sports, the distinction between coverages is slender. Exclusives are rare, and usually very temporary. Which means that your experience with paywalls is probably the same as everyone else’s: just find another story on the same topic somewhere else.
Which is easy to do since you’re already in a browser window and already engaged with a device. You’re unlikely to head to a newsstand to search out a publication providing coverage you‘re looking for when you can just do a search. And you’re unlikely to really care about the relative quality of the coverage—at the end of it, cataclysmic news (which is all the instant internet really caters to) only has a few bits of real information, and the facts trump good coverage.
The digital format is limiting in size. Smartphones are used for about 70% of internet access. Desktops are down in the low teens. The real estate available for the presentation of anything is terribly small.
Which all is bad if one wants to try to use a print publication to compete with digital. But seems to us that it’s all good if one does what the internet cannot.
So instead of making a proper newspaper in the traditional sense, we think the better touchstone might be the original version of Life Magazine—general-interest, light entertainment, heavy on the visuals. And local subjects means exclusivity from anything on the web.
For a design approach, we are “inspired by” what it’s like to use the web: a summary of the available information up front, and then each subsection dedicated to that topic (akin to a drop down menu of About/FAQ/Contact/What-have-you leading to discrete webpages that only have that information). In the paper format, that means using the front page to hold only a key image, headline, and page reference. Inside, most of the stories are double spreads, so that when the pages are open there is only a single story presented—keeping it all contained in one place, with no need for chasing the text thread through the newspaper pages.
We hope we will follow along as we embark upon this adventure of returning to the golden age of journalism!