“Long before the term design was ever associated with newspapers, there was Ed Arnold. Long before there were Macs, or QuarkXPress, or SND, there was Ed Arnold. In the book of newspaper design, Ed Arnold is the Genesis — the prologue to a rich story of how our craft developed. And the trailblazer — a lone, but resounding, and articulate, voice. I can’t think of anyone else who could sit with a non-believing publisher and editor and convince them that packaging the news attractively was the key to getting readers to pay attention.”

The White House broke with tradition Wednesday night and refused to let photojournalists shoot still pictures of the president at the podium after his prime-time address on the Iraq war. As a result, newspapers and wire services had little choice but to run low-quality frame grabs from the video of the speech. An official handout photo from the White House, which most news outlets rejected, was the only other option.”

“…the goal for me, a data person focused more on the long term, is to store information in the most valuable format possible. The problem is particularly frustrating to explain because it’s not necessarily obvious; if you store everything on your Web site as a news article, the Web site is not necessarily hard to use. Rather, it’s a problem of lost opportunity. If all of your information is stored in the same ‘news article’ bucket, you can’t easily pull out just the crimes and plot them on a map of the city. You can’t easily grab the events to create an event calendar. You end up settling on the least common denominator: a Web site that knows how to display one type of content, a big blob of text. That Web site cannot do the cool things that readers are beginning to expect.”

“Everyone wants to sell more papers. Everyone is doing everything they can and virtually no one is succeeding. Why? Because almost every effort is too narrowly focused. What the industry needs is an enterprise-wide solution, beginning with a focus on the goal of selling more newspapers. Here are the steps…”

“Watergate also changed America, in ways that journalism hasn’t evolved to handle. In the three-and-a-half decades since Woodstein’s stories first began appearing in The Washington Post, while journalists have been busy honing their ability to uncover hidden information, the world has become a place where the scarcity of info isn’t the biggest problem. Its proliferation is. And by and large, journalism organizations don’t have the skills or tools to sort through all the data.” (Thanks kottke.org!)

“Last month the Society for News Design announced the 1,136 winners of their 27th Annual Creative Competition. This is not the first time the number of winners exceeded 10³, which begs the question: What other organization gives its members more than a thousand awards a year? The Pulitzer Prize Board gives 21 awards. Does SND believe that the appearance of words is 50 times more noteworthy than the meaning of words? I hope not. The Nobel Foundation grants six awards for things that are clearly more important than ‘overall redesign of a regularly appearing newspaper section.’ ‘Nuff said.”

“St. Pete Times media critic Eric Deggans has a feature in today’s paper on Mario Garcia and his ‘reimagining’ of the Wall Street Journal, which will launch a redesigned and narrower paper next year.”

“Today’s the day editors of newspapers who got caught out by bad information [about the West Virginia mining tragedy] yesterday try to explain what went wrong. Jay Rosen rounds up some of the explanations. And L.A. Observed illuminates how the L.A. Times, for one, got it right with a memo from Assistant Managing Editor John Arthur…”

“The Toronto Star and thestar.com announced today that the Company has removed the mandatory registration feature from its Internet site, making it even easier for readers to access Toronto’s best site for local, continuously updated news, blogs and information. ‘We believe that in order to be competitive in the online news and information space, growth of both audience and page impressions will be the cornerstone of our success. Further, we believe that the key to that growth is through the removal of all barriers, including registration,’ said Michael Goldbloom, Publisher, Toronto Star.”

“The American Press Institute (API) announced today a major yearlong project to invent and test new business models to help newspapers thrive in the next decade. It’s called ‘Newspaper Next: The Transformation Project,’ and API is investing $2 million into this project, which it calls the centerpiece of the Institute’s 60th anniversary.”

“The monster that will devour the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News isn’t even on the radar of the bosses at Knight-Ridder. And their plans to curtail news coverage and print more advertising will only make this creature more powerful. That monster is Google…”

“…if you think that newspapers before the 1960s were big slabs of gray type, don’t miss Jack Shafer’s look at Joseph Pulitzer’s beautiful early 20th century New York World.”

“A firsthand account of how a small band of Times-Picayune journalists covered devastation and misery in their shattered home.”

“Over the last two decades, the Pew people have plotted a steady decline in the credibility of newspapers among its survey respondents. In 1985, 84 percent said they could believe most of what they read in their daily newspaper, but by 2004 that number was down to 54 percent.”

“Moments after Silicon Valley blogger Matt Marshall saw a New York Times story saying Microsoft Corp. was in talks to acquire Internet marketer Claria Corp. last month he raised questions about it. Mr. Marshall, writing in his Web log, called the report ’strange’ and mused about whether the paper had been led astray by an anonymous source. A blogger critiquing the mainstream media is hardly unusual. But Mr. Marshall is also a reporter for the San Jose Mercury News who had been following Microsoft and Claria as part of his normal beat.”