Category Archives: Design and graphics

SPD blog: First look at the Newsweek redesign

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The SPD blog previews Newsweek’s redesign as the US weekly merges with the Daily Beast. According to SPD, the new-look magazine is due in newsagents a week today. The post includes and interview with Dirk Barnett, the man behind the redesign, who discusses the new logo, how the team is “bringing strong, dynamic photojournalism back to Newsweek”, plus plans for presenting data.

The Newsweek redesign comes a week after the relaunch of the New York Times Magazine, which took place yesterday.

Infographics, another element killed off over the past few years at Newsweek, will definitely be coming back. While we plan to up the presence, we have no plans to blow them out in a Bloomberg/Wired direction, our content just doesn’t require or sustain it (plus, Bloomberg Businessweek is killing it, who can compete with that?!). Rather, it will be a vital tool to telling elements of stories that photogrpahy or illustration just don’t nail. We have introduced a new page, DataBeast, that will give us the opportunity to do a weekly infogrpahic on various subjects.

 

 

Editors Weblog: The New York Times Magazine to launch redesign

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The Editors Weblog reported on yesterday’s relaunch of the New York Times Magazine. The magazine includes new features, new columnists, and some contributions from the newsroom staff of the New York Times.

The post also reports on a new blog launched on the magazine’s website last week.

On March 2nd, the site began The 6th Floor Blog: Eavesdropping on the Times Magazine. In its inaugural post, editor Hugo Lindgren explained, “This blog is meant as a humble complement to the magazine — a place to let readers listen in on the conversations that happen in the office.”  Several blogs have already been posted on a broad range of topics, from Libya’s ties to the British elite, to the question of what makes a good apology.

Full post on Editors Weblog at this link.

 

 

 

10,000 Words: MSNBC pushing the envelope of design

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Over on the 10,000 Words blog Mark Luckie looks at the use of design behind MSNBC’s websites, which he claims break the mold of a traditional news site design. He asks “does the splashy approach web design actually work or is it all sizzle?” It’s worth navigating around the MSNBC sites to decide for yourself.

A few months ago, MSNBC launched BLTWY (pronounced Beltway), a niche news site centered on the celebrity side of politics. What made the site truly stand out was its unconventional design — instead of a sea of text, the page is a grid made up mostly of photos that serve as links to individual stories.

The 10,000 Words post is at this link

OJB: Bella Hurrell on data journalism and the BBC News Specials Team

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Online Journalism Blog’s Paul Bradshaw asked Bella Hurrell, specials editor with BBC News Online, how data journalism was affecting their work for a forthcoming article.

Read her full response on the OJB site at this link.

As data visualisation has come into the zeitgeist, and we have started using it more regularly in our story-telling, journalists and designers on the specials team have become much more proficient at using basic spreadsheet applications like Excel or Google Docs. We’ve boosted these and other skills through in house training or external summer schools and conferences.

Innovative Portuguese daily i wins best designed newspaper award

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Portuguese daily newspaper i (short for informação, not to be confused with the new bite-sized Independent), has been named the world’s best designed newspaper by the Society for News Design.

Judges in the 32nd annual Best of Newspaper Design Creative Competition said that the paper “stood out for its ability to take the best of the visual language of newspapers, magazines and other publications and create something new that is more than the sum of its parts”.

It’s compact. It’s fresh. It’s consistent, yet full of surprises. Its magazine-like size allows the reader to hold the newspaper close; the format invites the reader to engage more deeply. The publication is packed with information, yet extremely well organized, using elements of layering and editing to draw readers into every page.

i, which is closer to a magazine in format and is stapled, launched in May 2009, aiming to experiment as much as possible with design and layout. “”We just don’t care,” said Martim Figueiredo, publisher and editor of i, at the 2009 World Association of Newspapers (WAN) conference.

“There are no obligations. The only obligation of our news team is to target what people want each morning (…) we organise the news so that people don’t get lost.”

The paper also launched with the idea of targeting an untapped audience. According to a report from the Editors Weblog in 2009, 23 per cent of i’s readers had not regularly read newspapers before.

The title won European Newspaper of the Year in the 2009 European Newspaper Awards.

See a slideshow of images of i at this link.

‘You can’t give a machine data and get journalism out the other end’

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Guardian information architect Martin Belam blogs today about the latest in a series of talks at the newspaper about digital products and services.

In-house developer Daithí Ó Crualaoich worked with Belam on the inclusion of MusicBrainz IDs and ISBNs in the Guardian’s Open Platform API and has worked on some of the newspaper’s recent high profile datajournalism projects. Ó Crualaoich’s talk addressed the software development part of datajournalism.

He reminded the audience that software devs are not journalists. They have general purpose skills with software that can be turned to any processing function, like the controls on a washing machine, but they generally, he said, have very limited skills in understanding what makes a story into “a story” in the way that journalists process information. This means that to take part in these kinds of projects, software developers have to adapt their general purpose skills to focus on journalism.

Full post on currybetdotnet at this link.

BetaTales: Can the story of traffic accidents be told in a new way?

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BetaTales takes a look at a new project based on traffic accident data from journalists and programmers at Norwegian media house Bergens Tidende.

Accidents are apparently common fare in the Western part of Norway, with frequent news reports of collisions on the region’s narrow, winding roads.

With this in mind, journalists at Bergens Tidende approached the Norwegian Public Roads Administration armed with the Freedom of Information Act, eventually getting access to a database of all road accidents in the country.

The database turned out to be a journalistic goldmine: It contained details about 11,400 traffic accidents all over the country, all neatly arranged in an Excel file. Not only did the database give the exact position of each accident, but it also included numerous details, such as how many were killed and injured, the seriousness of injuries, driving conditions, type of vehicle, type of street, speed limit, time of the day, etc.

Still, most journalists would at this point probably have been happy to take a look at the database, extract some of the relevant accidents and made a couple of news stories based on them. In Bergens Tidende, though, the journalists instead were teamed up with programmers. Within a few weeks all the traffic accidents in the country had been put on a big Google map with endless ways to search the database.

Full story on BetaTales at this link.

“Killing Roads” project from Bergens Tidende at this link (Norwegian).

Bergens Tidende multimedia journalist Lasse Lambrechts talks about “Killing Roads”:

A look at the Guardian Hacks SXSW event

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The Guardian played host to designers, developers and journalists at the weekend for its “Guardian Hacks SXSW” event. (The raw data reveals that there were 82 developers, 12 girls and 12 ‘full beards’, among other things.)

Guardian information architect Martin Belam takes a look at some of the day’s hacks on his blog:

The hack that appeared to draw the most gasps from the assembled journalists in the room, and consequently won, was Articlr, which was presented by Jason Grant. It was a back-end tool for easily monitoring social media and rival coverage of a story in real-time, and then simply dragging-and-dropping elements from external sites into a story package. With a bit of geo-location goodness thrown in. I fully expect the feature request to be on my Guardian desk by about 11am this morning…

Plus you can see full coverage from the Guardian at this link and related Twitter goings on using the #gsxsw hashtag.

Fonts in Use: A detailed look at the Daily’s typography

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Designer and typographer Stephen Coles has taken a comprehensive look at the fonts used in Murdoch’s new iPad newspaper, The Daily.

“It does have the look of a fairly serious weekly news magazine,” he writes. “Much of this posture comes from steering clear of ultra-modern or casual typefaces.

“My guess is that the style guide is still being written, staff are still getting comfortable with the format, and everyone is still learning what’s possible in this new medium.”

Jonathan Stray: A computational journalism reading list

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Journalist and computer scientist Jonathan Stray has posted an interesting breakdown of what he calls “computational journalism”, a kind of parent term for data journalism, visualisation, computational linguistics, communications technology, filtering, research and more.

I’d like to propose a working definition of computational journalism as the application of computer science to the problems of public information, knowledge, and belief, by practitioners who see their mission as outside of both commerce and government. This includes the journalistic mainstay of “reporting” — because information not published is information not known — but my definition is intentionally much broader than that.

Stray has put together a reading list under each sub-header (including our very own ‘How to: get to grips with data journalism‘).

Worth a read.

Full post on Jonathan Stray’s blog at this link.