Does your newspaper look as dull as ditchwater?

With editorial budgets being squeezed ever tighter and managements increasingly focused on digital first, does it still matter what a newspaper looks like? You bet it does. I spend half my working life in newspaper offices and, unfortunately, still find:

• Flights of dull fillers, plundered from the ‘what’s on’ column? 

• Headlines with blands words such as ‘boosts’, ‘plans’ and ‘residents’. 

• Pictures of buildings as the main image.

• Citizen journalism that has led to pages of landscape pictures. I like contributed stories and photographs - but am often not keen on the execution. Newspapers are about people, not sunsets and trees. If the readers want flowers, they can pick up a bulb catalogue.

• Templating that has been misunderstood and has led to two-deck headline syndrome. It has made some journalists lazy and stifled their creative juices.

• Body copy set in 8pt Times, which is just about unreadable.

If longevity is the aim, these nasty habits need to be changed. Quickly. Good design can keep the sale stable but, more importantly, poor design is guaranteed to cause premature haemorrhaging. 
Some regional newspapers are excellent of course. I was massively impressed with the front pages and the design shortlists at last week’s Regional Press Awards. But there are still too many that look boring - and in today’s newspaper world, boring is the biggest sin.
If you recognise any of these traits, you may want to take a look at my tips on how to make your paper look better, which is in this month’s InPublishing magazine. Take a look here.  

Design awards: Honorable mention for Times

It's that time of year when dozens of judges from the Society of Newspaper Design pore over the world's newspapers and decide which are the best looking. The five winners, who can now claim to be the world's best designed newspapers, were announced on Wednesday. They are:

Dagens Nyheter, Stockholm, Sweden

Welt am Sonntag, Berlin, Germany 

Die Zeit, Hamburg, Germany

Politiken, Copenhagen, Denmark

The Grid, Toronto, Canada

You can see a slideshow of each one here.

As usual British newspapers were under-represented. I was pleased to see, though, that The Times received a well-deserved Judges' Special Recognition Award for its 'visual story telling' of the Olympics.

The judges said: "It’s that level of detail that really separates this from other entries. It’s clean, well thought-out, and so smart. It uses the medium incredibly well, and in such unique ways. It was the most thorough and consistent coverage we saw of the Games. A true Olympic effort — and all done on deadline." Well done to design editor @jonhilldesign and his team.

The Times also won a Gold Medal for Magazine Design for Eureka. The judges said it was 'both beautiful and explanatory'. It is also, sadly, no more. The 64-page science magazine closed last October after 37 issues.

Another paper that caught my eye was the Gulf News with its confident and detailed infographics. If you want to see more, you can plough through the many categories on the SND website.

Book now for free online design seminar

I am delivering a 20-minute seminar, called How To Redesign a Newspaper, live on the web later this month. I will go through the designer's checklist, identify pitfalls, show examples and take questions. The seminar is the first of a series of training masterclasses using new Livestream technology to be offered by Press Association Training. It will be live on the web at 1pm on Friday March 19. You can watch the seminar from your office or even from home. It is free but places are restricted to 50. If you would like to book a place contact Head of Press Association Training, Tony Johnston, on tony.johnston@pressassociation.com for details.