theology&geometry

When my friends Brandon and Amanda moved into their new apartment, they came upon an April 4, 1950, issue of The Commercial Appeal, and they were kind enough to let me get my grubby paws on it. The thing is quite yellowed and brittle, and has a tendency to shed bits of itself as you flip carefully from page to page. It’s fascinating stuff; the pages are absolutely chock full of tiny briefs and stories mixed with ads and cartoons and testimonials and photos of beauty queens.

Check out this masthead (fun fact: “masthead” means the staff credits/info box and NOT the nameplate/flag on the front page and I will remove your kneecaps with my teeth if you argue with me about that):

Look at those cheap mail subscription rates! A month for a dollar! Crazy!

Look at those phone numbers! So devoid of digits! Crazy!

Look at all those bureau offices! So numerous! Crazy!

Look at this crazy cigarette ad!

Does your throat feel smooth as a baby’s ass? That’s because you’ve been sucking on a Camel!

Check out this crazy mix of news! A snuff factory! Chilly nights that require topcoats! Topcoats, can you believe it!?? (Also, was “cloudly” a word in 1950 or did I just copy edit this paper FROM THE FUTURE?!)

Do you think Miss Sanidas was scandalized at being placed so near an ad for a cream that relieves pimple itching?

It’s all a pretty odd mix, and certainly puts into perspective the idea of some golden bygone era of quality, untouchable, objective journalism.

I mean, try this little story on for size:

First of all, mad props for a badass and ballsy headline.

But on to the meat of the story: Yes, folks, those poor white motorists who had every right to arrive at their destination unmolested were undone — UNDONE, I SAY! — by those pesky negroes. It is such a foreign thing to see that sort of language used, and so cavalierly because it was just how things were said and done. It just was. What a world. What an awful fucking world. This, more or less, is why I don’t believe in The Good Old Days. Next time some old timer tries to lament the past and how America has gotten away from its true and noble values, remind that old timer that The Good Old Days were shit for a lot of people.

I’m glad I have a little tangible piece as proof.

(More photos of the paper are here. I will probably add more down the line before the thing disintegrates.)

Part two of the True Crime series rolled out on Sunday. The story chronicles the Clementine neighborhood, which is statistically the most violent area of Memphis. Some pretty incredible journalism here.

Part one’s layout is here.

Nine pages of news-design goodness. Next installment hits the streets Oct. 18. (Please ignore the wonky spread alignment here; were I smarter, I would have tweaked the spreads before uploading individual pages, but I am very, very dumb sometimes. Rest assured that the folios printed in alignment. Or should have.)

Every now and then I get to head up the design on a special project at work, and for a couple of weeks now I’ve been wrestling with this behemoth True Crime special section (will post images as soon as I can get my hands on them; the front-page teeze is at left). A lot of hours and eye twitches went into this section, and I’m really grateful for my co-workers for stepping up to cover so much live design while I was busy trying to pull everything together from multiple sources (lots of reporters and photographers worked on the story, and we farmed some of the graphics out to an intern at another paper) while tons of editors kept close watch and had intense debates about headlines and display photos and what it all meant. Anyway, it was fun to work on, if not completely fucking stressful. Check out the web component here. This is the first in an occasional series. I’ll post the others as they roll out later this year.

Spent my evening working on a Flash project for work. It didn’t start out well, because I’m still in self-teaching mode (and rusty from the weeks of atrophy following my early February Flash blitz course). But it ended just fine. In fact, I leapt up from my chair and ran around the water fountain and danced a little jig.

I hope my luck holds because I’ve got to haul ass to get this thing done soon and I don’t usually have the luxury of time that I had tonight.

That’s the new newspaper landscape. Less people doing more.

Live it. Love it. Etc.

[Project 365]

DUDE! At 2:53:

Final Edition from Matthew Roberts on Vimeo.

Busy busy busy night at work. Lots of news, lots of news meetings and meetings about news. We’re trying to plan for our inauguration coverage and get the daily paper out and all the while, the entire newspaper industry is collapsing around us. It’s, if I may coin a rather vulgar phrase, a clusterfuck of epic clusterfuckitude.

We’ve got Hearst trying to sell the Seattle P-I (where my former art director works) and now the Minneapolis Star Tribune has filed for bankruptcy. And Gannett, for whom several of my friends work, is ordering a weeklong furlough among its employees this quarter. This is among the ongoing abysmal and well-documented problems at other papers (Google “newspaper crisis” for a real pick-me-up some time; try not to get distracted by Google’s hideous new favicon) industrywide.

Things are bad. Real, real bad. And they’re not going to get better. Things are changing, slowly but getting faster and faster, and it’s going to be painful for people who are used to the traditional way things have been, people who lived through the heyday of newspapers when there was such a thing as a news cycle. We are drenched in free information now, and there is no putting that cap back on the toothpaste tube now. Nor should there be. I love the internet and its capacity for not only entertaining but for getting more people up to speed on more things than ever before. I want newspapers to embrace the potential of the web and get out in front of trends and bring their hefty institutional weight to the online newsgathering process. I want newspapers — printed or no — to continue to be the publications of record. It’s a civic duty that I take seriously, despite my irreverent, profane blatherings to the contrary. I want us to be useful. No, not useful: indipensible. Aggressive and badass. Telling and showing. All that. I have high hopes for the types of journalism that will survive and thrive once the immediacy of the web is fully embraced. I want to see how much more careful and meticulous and accountable reporters and editors will have to be once they understand that their words carry fast and far on these tubes.

I’m in a weird spot because my job — the person who arranges stories and art on the page that will be printed — isn’t going to exist forever. My friends’ and co-workers’ jobs aren’t going to exist forever. What we can actively hope for is that we can grow and change and withstand the labor pains and find a niche for ourselves in the emerging media landscape. Learn how to do web design. Learn how to edit videos and audio and photos. Learn how to create content. How to aggregate content. All that and more.

We’re willing, I assure you. The average journo worth his weight in newsprint wants to do whatever it takes to maintain his relevance to the community. But a complete overhaul of everything you know and everything you are and ever have been is easier said than done. We don’t have the luxury of time to sit around and solve our existential and philosophical problems; we’ve got to get the paper out. We still have deadlines to hit every night. Every night. It would be nice if we could look to industry leaders to do some heavy lifting to shake up the status quo and get out ahead for once. But so far there’s been little but crickets chirping. But the overhaul has to be done. It needs to be done. It’s happening and we can’t slow this thing down. Some people find it easier to get off this janky ride right now and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t think about it every day. But others will tell you that once this stuff gets in your blood, it’ll take much more than a transfusion to get it out.

Still, the nostalgia and wonder attached to the big ol’ printing press won’t die easily. Just think about all the movies that feature that iconic spinning newspaper, or the camera panning past a bulletin board of news clippings. The printed newspaper has had such a fantastic run in our culture that it’s gut-wrenching to imagine that some day it won’t exist at all. I have no idea if that’s true; I’m as successful a soothsayer as Sam Zell. But newspapers will at most be just a ghost of their former selves, and that’s sad enough on its own. I still stand in awe as our presses run. There’s just something so damn substantial about it.

So here’s to evolving. Whatever the hell that means.

Anyway, that’s some heavy shit. I invite you to wash it out of your mouth with this.

[Project 365]

My friend Coco provides some narration for the scene out in front of our office at roughly 3 p.m. Thursday (day two of Mission: Everyone Suddenly Wants Newspapers):

‘Milk it while we got it’ from Lindsey Turner on Vimeo.

Last night the TV news (I forget which station) broadcast live out front at 10, and the story was about how the paper was the hottest-selling item in town.

So, so weird.

They are directing traffic in the parking lot of my office so that people can drive up and buy editions of today’s paper. Demand was so high that they printed up 40,000 additional copies and they’ll be offering up other promotional items in the days to come.

I’ve not been in the newspaper business very long, so I’ve only lived through an era in which print is said to be dying a slow death. I’ve never really known what it feels like to face great demand for your product, so I have to confess: It’s flippin’ awesome.