Tracking and observing front pages

After reading How do readers really look at newspapers? by Brian Veseling of Newspapers and Technology on poynter.org, the time certainly seems to be ripe for a renewed look at print newspapers. After all, there have been some significant changes in both printing technology and how news and information are distributed in the past 15 years and these have undoubtedly influenced newspaper design and how people process information.
If you ever take a minute to catch the direction your eyes surfs across a printed front page of news, compared to how your eyes surf across web page’s front page of news, there are many difference and similarities.
Personally, I prefer print for one reason, that is the flashy advertisements distract me more than anything else. They are my pet peeve of Internet news gathering, although it is also probably one of the greatest source of revenue for these businesses.
New businesses’ staff executives and layout designers are trying every day to figure out how and where to place what on their front pages. Last spring my Issues in Journalism class spent a month blogging and “wiki”-ing with members of the Nashua Telegraph, critiquing to them how young readers surf their page. Check out their improvements to our comments on the Nashua Telegraph.
Jonathan Dube, Cyberjournalist.net publisher, posted a comment on poynter.org regarding Today's News and where to look for front pages on the Internet. He said that One of the great advantages the Internet gives journalists and newshounds is the ability to read thousands of newspapers (or dozens, depending on how much free time you have). In addition to reading the online versions of newspapers, here are a few free ways to scan newspapers from around the world.
Dube suggests checking out slate.com and newseum.org to get a concise look at every national, and some international front pages on a daily basis. This is a great tool.
After taking a look at some of the front pages of the east coast, I compare and contrast the importance of story placement. A look at today’s Boston Globe, you notice that their upper left front page stories usually deal with a local issue, such as the clean up of 14 state beaches ranging from Lynn to Hull. Their upper right story takes a national issue of emissions from new cars and trucks and brings it back to a local angle saying that Massachusetts led the case against the EPA. Their front page has two truly local stories and three nationally reaching stories.
A look at Tuesday’s Christian Science Monitor reveals that its top story is the EPA story, followed with a story about whether detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba are entitled to court hearings on challenging their open-ended detention by the Bush administration’s war on terror. The story beneath that is on South American politics about whether a politician can speak her indigenous language on the floor. The photo caption on the Amish school students returning to school in Nickel Mines, Pa. after last October’s shootings also made the front page instead of the Globe’s A2 page. The paper provides a public opinion list along the front left of the page on other national and international issues. So, this paper provides the readers with a more national, international look.
While New Hampshire’s Union Leader sticks to mostly state news as their front page unfolds, the national and international news an be noticed listed along the left hand side.
Rhode Island’s Providence Journal has an easy to follow front page for today, with the entire left side devoted to the huge Red Sox loss to Kansas City, showing a picture of a frustrated Curt Schilling. The entire right hand side is devoted to the EPA story, followed by two state-wide stories of interest. Below the Schilling photo going from left to right is a story on sleep and depression taken from the Washington Post, then a story about an RI mobster, followed by lists of inside stories.
I could go onto to the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the St. Petersburg Times or the Chicago Tribune (which was bought out by a real estate tycoon today) but I feel it’s quite clear - some newspapers have a more appealing layout than others, especially when it comes to front pages.
On a side note, the new editor-in-chief of The New Hampshire student newspaper certainly has done a nice makeover of the front page, making it the only U.S. paper I have found today with the AP wire about the tsunami striking the Solomon Islands on the front page!