Tribune Co. 'Chief Innovation Officer' Delivers More Laugh Lines

Prototype. Offered without comment.

 

if you ever wanted to know what fail would look like in a broadsheet package, you just found out.

 

Explain.

 

So the other half of O'Bama's brain is a middle-aged, pearl-sporting black woman?

 

-- trib.

-- a huge mugshot of some lady, with one leg of text over two columns on a page that sorely needs better-positioned white (no pun intended) space.

-- question heds do nothing for me.

-- most importantly, a layout that will be impossible to reproduce every day. i would hate to design that front page on a sunday night outside football season.

 

-- People call it the Trib.

-- So the big mug shot is a bit ... magazine-ish? ... but doesn't that mug with the Obama headline make you slightly curious? My first thought ... that's Obama's mom. Yeah, I do wanna read about Obama's mom.

-- Agreed. Question headlines are typically fail. And in this case, it is fail.

-- Well, that's because you don't mimic that EVERY day. You can't really be suggesting a 4 by 12 mug works for every story, and I doubt the Trib people are suggesting that either. And why would it be a pain outside of football season? I can only assume it's the cutout in the upper right corner. There's never any other sporting event on a Sunday? Or, maybe some award thing (Oscars, drawing a blank, etc.)? Obviously there needs to be some planning for pages like this, but it's not THAT bad.

 

Obama's mom is white, FWIW

 

I hate that term "better-positioned white space".

To me white space is like the air you see when you open a bag of potato chips and see it only half full.

"I paid for THIS?"

And that's what our recently redesigned paper has become.

White space between paragraphs in charts. White space above any subheads in a story. White space between labels and heads in briefs packages. White space forced onto most open pages because it's built on a 9-column grid (it's not quite what you think, but still sucks).

 

news on sunday is full of ... nothing. if you want to be topical and, um, newsy, you need something with a news peg on there.

at least during football season you can come up with some lame centerpiece based on the prior day's game.

frank ridgeway once said it best on one of the orlando threads. sure, their sports section plans up the wazoo and puts together nice enterprise, but at some point you have to have *news* content. not fluff. and if you're going magazine-style seven days a week, that gets old fast.

and bt, i mean better positioned white space as in not giving me a massive leg of text. that's just way too big of a leg of text there, imo.

 

So the woman on the page has spent a little time on the beach.

 

Obama's not newsy right now? Anyone related to the Obama camp isn't newsy?

You can't be newsy and magazine-ish at the same time? I'm not suggesting that every day, mind you, but once or twice a week. Then again, that would require enterprising stories instead of taking what falls in our laps.

 

you can -- but not at the staffing levels at which papers currently operate. and not when your execs have mentioned that byline count is a high priority.