Running Lee Enterprises thread

So it actually isn’t the standard Lee design. FYI, The current design for the Buffalo News is a set of custom modules set up just for them. It looks nothing like the standard Lee modules or the new modules that are being used for papers moving to three-day publication. And the modules were all approved by News editors before they were out into place. Omaha has a similar set-up, as does St. Louis.

 

The designers working on the News pages have put in a lot of effort. Those tweets cherry-picked a handful of design center-produced pages and compared them to your not-average daily News page.

I get being pissed at corporations, but attacking the rank-and-file who are doing their best in the situation they’re in seems kinda fucked up.

 

It looks very similar to my old Lee shop. Several of the inside pages are identical.

I have read the BEN for more than 60 years, starting as a kid back when we also got the Courier-Express. when Buffalo was a two-paper town. I have nothing but respect for the people who work/worked there, going back to the days of Larry Felser and Cy Kritzer. I read it still, every day, cover to cover, even the obits. I just hate what Lee is doing to it, despite the best efforts of you and the others who work there.

Just wanted that part to be clear.

 

I wasn’t attacking anyone. I was making a statement about working in a design studio in general.

And in general, if a studio designer isn’t working beyond a predesigned 1A template at a paper that provides good content, that’s a wasted opportunity.

 

Bullshit. You flat out stated they weren’t putting in the effort to make good pages with no knowledge of the situation. Fucking own your words. That was a crap statement to make about visual journalists working their asses off in a situation not of their making, and you attacked them with your “they could put in a little effort” comment. I work with some amazing, hard-working journalists, and your snide bullshit comment was a shot at them.

 

This is fair. The News has been picking up some of Lee’s inside pages, esp. in sports I believe, since before their design even moved to the design centers. But they’ve kept the regular inside poster pages that are one of their hallmarks.

Design centers are part of the realities of our business these days. I miss the days of family-owned papers with their own designs as much as anyone if not more so. I cut my teeth copying designs from Vince Chiarmonte in Buffalo probably more than anyone. To be honest (probably more honest than my bosses would want me to be), when we bring in a new paper, we spend a little while getting to know the editors and building trust with them before we start bloating with things more. Once I get back from my current vacation, I hope to get a chance to branch out more and do more of what I’m capable of doing and what I think they and their readers are used to seeing.

 

I’m sorry you took it that way, but that wasn’t what I was doing. Look at my posts. I don’t shit on designers here. But if you want to rage at me, be my guest.

EDIT: I went back and saw where my comment was and I definitely could see why you'd think that's what I was saying. I can assure you, I wasn't saying the Lee design studio is filled with a bunch of lazy box-fillers. I honestly can't evaluate their design. I'm completely unfamiliar with how their papers have looked, except that one front page of the Buffalo News. What I was saying was that just because you're in a studio with "modular design" doesn't mean every page has to look the same, which was the focus of that complaint tweet. And what I was trying to say definitely came off a lot snarkier than I intended. Sorry about that.

 

Lee design center makes mediocrity a wistful aspiration.

 

Yeah, this is not what I was saying, @JRoyal.

 

It ain't the designers, it's the suits (yo, Fredrick!). I know of design centers where the designers are told not to aim high with their creative aspirations anymore, just bang those pages out simple and fast because there's plenty more where that came from. And that, of course, led to page templates and a whole lot of other stupid, mind-numbing stuff.

Stay in the box. No need to venture outside the box. Thank you.

 

Really? I mean, I can see kind of being sent that message through other means, but explicitly? "Don't work too hard on these fronts?" Man ...

 

Really. ... Explicitly.

Kind of a natural progression, though. There have always been plenty of lousy supervising editors who would much rather have an entire staff of average page designers. Much easier that way (for them) if nobody ever does anything any better than anybody else.