There’s more to redesigning a newspaper than earning the wrath of your coworkers
This is the Sunday, Feb. 7, 1988 edition of the Northwest Florida Daily News featuring the new name and new look. Image by Del Stone Jr.
Our newspaper, the Daily News, has embarked on an ambitious redesign project which I am overseeing, and this has given me the opportunity to investigate many important design questions, foremost among them the question of how much am I going to be paid extra for doing this.
The staff and I have become like brothers and sisters during this project, and though my sisters and I fought to near-death until we were older and wiser and could hire trained killers to manage our inter-family relationships, I have nothing but optimism for the redesign’s eventual success, though I may be witnessing that happy event from the great newsroom in the sky.
If I were to offer a single piece of advice to an editor contemplating a redesign, it would be to lie down and take several pills until the feeling passes or you die. But newspapers must change if they are to survive, which what the last Neanderthal man said as the tool-making Cro-Magnon man sedated him with a large clubbing tool. So to avoid the tar pits I have blundered into, you should consider the following:
WHAT GOES THERE? The most difficult aspect of a redesign involves choosing an identity for your newspaper. Presumably, your newspaper’s identity should be derived from your community’s identity, unless your community consists of a penal colony, an industry that has been rendered obsolete by talking Japanese toy robots and a rehabilitation clinic for serial ax murderers. In that case you should put a large brown bag over your community and kidnap subscribers from other communities.
If felony is not an option and your community has no identifiable identity, it would be best if you published your newspaper under what is known as an Assumed Identity, which will then impart an Assumed Identity to your community so that nobody will know who anybody else really is, and your community will probably be crossed off the map, as if it were participating in a federal witness protection program.
WHAT’S IT GOING TO LOOK LIKE? Will your newspaper be gray and drab and remind the reader that he really should get going and have that will made out? Or will ti feature high-candlepower, dazzling color photographs, eye-popping graphics and multi-chromatic bar treatments, so that when the reader opens the page he is charred by third-degree powder burns?
Decisions, decisions. You can save yourself some trouble if you take this precaution: If the redesign looks bad, stick to your guns, at least for the first 10 minutes, then blame it on someone else such as the Advertising Department or the community. You can even blame it on the federal witness protection program. At any rate, it certainly wasn’t YOUR fault.
PRODUCING MOCKUPS: A number of pitfalls await the designer at this stage of the project.
1. You will be tempted to use may different typefaces so that your pages resemble ransom notes. Do not do this. Stick to only several hundred typefaces, and carefully regulate their usage, as in, “Helvetica may only be used when the Pope canonizes another street dweller” or, “Perpetua is reserved for stories about hang glider pilots who find religion in the clouds, not to mention birds of prey.”
2. You will be tempted to box as many stories and photographs as you can, which will look as if a spider’s web has been sucked into the press. It’s much easier if you use fewer rules but compensate by increasing the thickness of the rule. For example: DON’T use 400 one-point rules on a page. Instead, use a single 400-point rule.
3. Many, many years ago, as far back as the early ’80s even, it was decided that tint blocks could break up a gray page with the really novel approach of putting even more gray on the page. Now that pages resemble aerial photographs of Nebraska farmland, you may be tempted to refine the process by screening only selected passages of stories, as if your page had passed through the hands of Israeli censors.
I suggest you screen the entire page.
GETTING READY FOR THE REDESIGN: Eventually, you will actually have to do something to bring the redesign closer to reality, such as talking about having a negative of something made. This will require expertise in negotiating with the cameraroom, which means you should spend few hours each week at a pistol range before you actually go into the cameraroom to negotiate.
This is how the conversation might go if you are unprepared:
You: Excuse me, sir, but could you please make a negative of this? I know it’s an imposition and I promise to make it up to you somehow, though I can’t say when because little Billy needs an operation to remove my wife’s pacemaker from his stomach, which he accidentally swallowed when he was giving mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to his older sister after she tried to hock the pacemaker to a neighborhood crack dealer and the FBI raided the place and she put it in her mouth to hide the evidence and then fainted because she’s hypoglycemic, and the only reason little Billy was there to save her was because she was supposed to be babysitting him since my wife is in the hospital having her intestines scraped.
Camerarooom dweller: Die and go to hell.
You: Yes sir, and thank you sir. You’ve been more than generous with your time.
But with adequate preparation, you can have the cameraroom eating out of your hands.
You: Hands up against the wall. Spread ’em! Make a negative of this and don’t give me any backtalk or I’ll blow your brains out all over the mounting plate with this .357 Magnum.
Cameraroom dweller: YES SIR! You’re a rough and tough newspaper designer, and I’m going to do exactly what you say right now! And how else may I serve you, Master?
CHANGE, CHANGE AND MORE CHANGE: At some point during the redesign process, probably between the “Developing of High Concepts” stage and the “Just Chewing the Fat about It” stage, keener minds will begin to suspect that a redesign might alter the newspaper’s appearance.
This must be avoided at all costs. Nobody must know anything – not even you. Otherwise, you will seriously reduce the level of confusion when the redesign debuts.
WHEN THE REDESIGN DEBUTS: You will know if the redesign is a success if you walk into the newsroom and are greeted with thunderous applause and the publisher hands you a check for $20 skillion dollars, in which case you should thank your producer, your director and all the little people who helped you.
But just to be on the safe side, have a Lear jet standing by with the engines running.
About the author:
Del Stone Jr. is a professional fiction writer. He is known primarily for his work in the contemporary dark fiction field, but has also published science fiction and contemporary fantasy. Stone’s stories, poetry and scripts have appeared in publications such as Amazing Stories, Eldritch Tales, and Bantam-Spectra’s Full Spectrum. His short fiction has been published in The Year’s Best Horror Stories XXII; Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine; the Pocket Books anthology More Phobias; the Barnes & Noble anthologies 100 Wicked Little Witch Stories, Horrors! 365 Scary Stories, and 100 Astounding Little Alien Stories; the HWA anthology Psychos; and other short fiction venues, like Blood Muse, Live Without a Net, Zombiesque and Sex Macabre. Stone’s comic book debut was in the Clive Barker series of books, Hellraiser, published by Marvel/Epic and reprinted in The Best of Hellraiser anthology. He has also published stories in Penthouse Comix, and worked with artist Dave Dorman on many projects, including the illustrated novella “Roadkill,” a short story for the Andrew Vachss anthology Underground from Dark Horse, an ashcan titled “December” for Hero Illustrated, and several of Dorman’s Wasted Lands novellas and comics, such as Rail from Image and “The Uninvited.” Stone’s novel, Dead Heat, won the 1996 International Horror Guild’s award for best first novel and was a runner-up for the Bram Stoker Award. Stone has also been a finalist for the IHG award for short fiction, the British Fantasy Award for best novella, and a semifinalist for the Nebula and Writers of the Future awards. His stories have appeared in anthologies that have won the Bram Stoker Award and the World Fantasy Award. Two of his works were optioned for film, the novella “Black Tide” and short story “Crisis Line.”
Stone recently retired after a 41-year career in journalism. He won numerous awards for his work, and in 1986 was named Florida’s best columnist in his circulation division by the Florida Society of Newspaper Editors. In 2001 he received an honorable mention from the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association for his essay “When Freedom of Speech Ends” and in 2003 he was voted Best of the Best in the category of columnists by Emerald Coast Magazine. He participated in book signings and awareness campaigns, and was a guest on local television and radio programs.
As an addendum, Stone is single, kills tomatoes and morning glories with ruthless efficiency, once tied the stem of a cocktail cherry in a knot with his tongue, and carries a permanent scar on his chest after having been shot with a paintball gun. He’s in his 60s as of this writing but doesn’t look a day over 94.
Contact Del at [email protected]. He is also on Facebook, twitter, Pinterest, tumblr, TikTok, and Instagram. Visit his website at delstonejr.com .