Sports Designer | San Jose Mercury News

Maybe that the job posting is two months old. I was fooled at first, too.

Broken record though he may be, I have to agree with DyePack that all our packaging wizardry has not seemed to help over the years. You would be hard-pressed to find better-looking newspapers at the time of their death than the New York Herald-Tribune and The Washington Star. Meanwhile, antiquated A-1s do not seem to have hurt The Wall Street Journal or The New York Times. My newspaper's redesign was unquestionably an improvement but had zero impact on circulation.

Unlike DyePack, I do not believe design is worthless, but I do believe we have overemphasized it in the hope that inexpensive cosmetics can somehow compensate for our shortcomings in other areas.

In San Jose's case, that's nice that they win awards. When they started tweaking the look in the early 1990s, though, I thought it was a mistake and I still think so. They took a classically elegant design driven by spectacular large photos, clean Bodoni typeface and terrific news judgment and cluttered it with a lot of crapola that seems at times to drive the product rather than vice versa. It impresses fellow designers, but I don't think you can argue that it has impressed non-readers sufficiently that they want to buy the paper.

 

Yes. This was posted in September.

As might be obvious, with 41 layoffs looming, no, we are not still in the hiring mode. (And, yes, it's almost certain that a portion of our visuals staff will get the axe.)

 

Mea culpa. I never saw the date. Guess that's what happens when you have close friend(s) who work there, will likely lose his/her job, and you see a headline looking for new hires.

Good luck with the road ahead Mr. Ball ... that has to be a hard position to be in.

 

S.O.P.=When Singleton buys your paper, dust off the resume...

I've posted this before, and it still stands:

This cannot be a shock to anyone, right?
This is what this man does. Dean Singleton has done it for more than three decades. He closed the Fort Worth Press and sold off the parts for profit in 1975.
What troubles me the most: Somehow, recently, he has become some sort of Newspaper Dignitary. He's not. Other than covering local sports and local government, his papers are lean-running cash cows with little investment in journalism and investigative reporting. It's a model. A money-making model for a profiteer. No more. No less.

 

Anyone remember the Houston Post? I worked there ... and was on staff at the time Mr. Singleton closed the doors at the building near the Southwest Freeway/Loop 610 spaghetti bowl of highways. While every person has an ability to choose to change (notice I said choice), sometimes, I just don't see the "change" taking place. I read a lot of what Mr. Singleton said recently, especially now that he's getting involved in AP stuff. Which sort of doesn't please me ... but just like someone else said earlier, watch and get those resumes ready.

Just my humble opinion.

I love SportsJournalists.com!!

 

My two cents:

When Gannett "gave" The Sun in San Bernardino to Singleton (I'm not gonna bash. I swear), my wife and I had given like six weeks notice as she was news editor and we were leaving to the Sac Bee and we liked the editor and ME. The day the deal was announced, we went into the ME's office and shortened our notice to two weeks... at his urging. "Get out quick," he said.

I met tball when he was talking with The Bee (he went to Indy instead. our loss). I know quite a few other people at The Merc. I've also turned down the opportunity to go to jobs there. And that was before Singleton just because of cost of living. Now, with Dean at the wheel, it scares the hell out of me.

Good luck to everyone out there. Another reason I'm going back to a Web operation and leaving print.