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Advertising Age asked some designers how they would give the Old Gray Lady a facelift and change the New York Times broadsheet, and the answers are practical, hilarious, and just wacky. The most common suggestion is to make the paper more compact and tabloid size for portability (gasp) to putting more gossipy stories in between hard news on the front page (GASP), to having a co-branded "Times Cafe" with a coffee house to hiring new photographers. Oh, and eliminating the paper all together. Gothamist agrees that making the Times easier to fold (we never got the "how to fold the NY Times" curriculum in our school) would be at the top of our list, especially given all the different sections on a weekday, but we actually like how it's sort of dated and serif-y... in fact, the NY Times' stubbornness to not change that much (remember when color photographs started to appear?) and be the Paper of Record on high reminds us who is boss when it comes to newspaper coverage in this town. If making the type face rounder is a solution, then everyone should throw in the towel.
How would you redesign the New York Times broadsheet? Or is it good as is?
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Momentum seems to be gathering around the mid-sized "Berliner" format, used by Le Monde, La Repubblica, and, as of next week, The Guardian.
please for the love of god, don't add gossip to the Times. If people want to buy US weekly and other celebrity rags, that's what they're there for. Keep the times the place to go for news.
The Times (and the WSJ for that matter) should be considerably narrower than the width of a subway seat to allow for easier reading and folding. So yeah, a smaller web width would be nice.
The Times foolishly thinks that declining readership is a design problem. I read the paper every day for years but finally went cold turkey when Paul Krugman got a regular column. Krugman is a creepy leftie version of Rush Limbaugh. I don't consider the Times as a serious paper any more as they have become increasingly pandering.
Yeah Pugsley, Krugman's just like Limbaugh. Limbaugh with a John Bates Clark medal. Go back to reading Instapundit.
Exactly. Rush Limbaugh with a John Bates Clark medal. Couldn't have said it better myself.
I wouldn't touch the format. I tihnk that the current design is functional and beautiful. I even appreciate the broadsheet. The content, however, could use a facelift. I wouldn't add anything gossipy, and instead make it more hard-news. Investigative reporting is a dead art, and I'd read anything that did it often and well.
The problem is the content is not matching the current format. I remember the NY Times of old--like even 10 years ago--and nowadys it's really fluffier than it should be. Thus the discussions on redesigning it.
Like Jason said. Don't redesign the paper to be more 'appealing'. Just get the stupid editorial staff to be something more than a printed version of NPR news.
Did people miss the proper way to fold the New York Times? I've had no problems reading it on the subway with one hand.
First you fold it vertically, then horizontally. You now have four quadrants allowing to read each of those quadrants individually. When you open the pages, you peel it back to the vertical fold.
There was actually an article about this a while back, ironically, in the New York Times
I am so used to the design and layout of the New York Times that I really have a hard time reading the newspaper in other cities. Leave Old Gray Lady be.
It's perfect just the way it is; perfect for lining the cat box or wrapping dead fish.
Most of the people questioned weren’t even layout artists, let alone typographers. Everyone thinks they know about type, but they wouldn’t even know about ligatures, the difference in usage of en and em dashes, and that the multiplication symbol is indeed a different character than the letter x.
Tabloidize it, in layout, not content.
www.forgotten-ny.com
they just announced that they're adding comics - I thought it already was a joke!
Maybe stop treating conservatives like they're an alien species?
Re-design won't cut it.
Better editing and reporting is whats needed.
here is a damning, comprehensive report of the Times coverage of their business partner, Bruce Ratner
I want an iTimes. A thin, light dedicated NY Times ebook player that plays nothing but the Times. Sell it for $250, the cost of an annual subscription, with a one-year subscription included. Download the file every morning and transfer it to the player. Read anywhere you want, even on the subway.
Brightliner, that's actually a brilliant idea. Save trees and getting elbowed in the gut by fellow passengers.
I've never thought about revamping the Times, but you know, changes isn't always bad! I think the most important change would be the size: making it more subway-friendly and making it so that opening it out on a cafe table doesn't interrupt your neighbour's activities. With smaller size, however, comes greater difficulty in folding (i.e. you'll require more pages to fit the same information). Conundrum.
My vote for content and design (re: fonts etc): keep it the same (you need continuity somewhere!). A redesign may cost the Times readership, as well as identity as it will lose its connection to Times past (haha).
Get rid of the Styles section, for starters.
My suggestion for a facelift: Change the line on the top of the front page that reads "one dollar" to "50 cents". Not *all* liberal snobs are rich, y'know!
I want an iTimes.
Ever look here? View the tour.
New York's subway system is about 100 years old. The New York Times is even older. People have been reading the Times on the train for a long, long time and have survived. It's not so hard to fold a newspaper.
"Electronic Edition,"
Yes, I know all about that. But it's not a good idea to pull out your laptop on the subway. You might as well scream, "Mug me!" Better to have a dedicated player. If it only played a proprietary Times data format and the subscription was tied to an account name and password on your computer rather than the player, it'd be worthless to thieves. (Not to mention locking competition out of the gadget.) Stealing it would nab you something not even heavy enough to make a good paperweight. Without all the fancy stuff on a laptop, it could be fairly cheap to manufacture, especially if the display's only grayscale (bringing the Times full circle back to being the Gray Lady). Electronic paper would let it last all day on a battery charge. Try that with your laptop battery.
I thought your morning latte, yuppie outfit and your copy of the NY Times already screamed "Mug me!"
Believe it or not, one of the first things that my political science teacher taught us in my freshmen seminar at Penn State was what he called the "commuter fold." Some of the most practical info I got from college. Unfortunately, he never taught us the commuter carry, something I still can't do well, as 5 sections of the NYT fall out from my armpit.