The other shoe drops in Chicago
WELL, THE GOOD news is that Tribune found a buyer. The bad news, for some anyway, is that the Chicago company still owns the Los Angeles Times. Sam Zell (Forbes No. 158), the real estate plutocrat who won the auction, says that he is only in it for the money, and will leave the journalism up to others.
Time for a redesign
LAST FRIDAY, 16 March, Time magazine appeared with a new design by Luke Hayman of Pentagram. (Luke talked about his on-staff redesign of New York on this site in December, and I reviewed the new Time.com a little later.)
This just in from Eustace Tilly
THE NEW YORKER has redesigned its web site, and the design is fine, but the approach to the web seems stubbornly retro. Resolutely anti-Web-2.0. The site seeks no community. And it is absent of dynamic content, although as the author of this very slow blog, I suppose I am not one to criticize. Only the calendar changes every day, and those items just come from the weekly magazine section, “Goings on About Town.”
Next step for the Rocky
THE Rocky Mountain News has moved to a new, delightfully small size. It's really a magazine size, and they are taking advantage of the change to update the redesign I worked on with a team from Danilo Black four years ago. This time there was a much deeper involvement from the staff, including workshops based on the project in Houston earlier last year.
Out of Time
ON THE DAY last week when Time.com’s redesign appeared, I was having lunch with a young magazine designer with a live interest in online media, a combination that is getting less rare. This guy is a survivor of Giant and Shock (if he applies to work on your magazine, watch out), and he asked me what I would do with Time. My first response was that if they held a gun to my head and told me they would pull the trigger if I didn’t come up with an editorial strategy for the leading newsmagazine, I would say, “Go ahead and shoot.”
It’s still the Journal
TUESDAY morning I opened the door, and in front of the apartment across the hall was a copy of the Wall Street Journal. My own was buried beneath The New York Times and the Financial Times, and I had to get the papers onto the kitchen table before I realized that the Journal had changed. It was smaller; less than a foot wide. Last week it would have stuck out of the stack.
A tale of two Times
IN OCTOBER, two big U.S. papers made some changes.The Los Angeles Times, under siege from its out-of-town owners, unveiled a redesigned front page and typography in the “A” section that at last matches the feature sections.