Retool your views

By Geoff Giordano
AME/News
The Journal News
White Plains, NY

With all the recent talk of "experience" newspapers (readership.org) and the hunt for young readers and "new" approaches, I responded in the way I'm sure a lot of us who take a visual approach to storytelling do: A bit of off-the-clock brainstorming.

In response to redesigns that aren't really too radically different than their predecessors, save for a snazzy new type face and a new color scheme (or some sort of color-coding schtick), I wanted to explore/explode a particularly staid portion of the paper: The editorial page.

Inspired by what Dave Yarnold has been doing at San Jose the past couple of years, I'm proposing a daily double-truck editorial/oped divided in this manner:

Top left: The daily editorial

Top right: Letters from readers (perhaps pulling a great quote or the gist of their view and referring to the full editorial on the web).

Middle top: A daily "brite" of sorts, a collection of polls about a topic of particular local/national/world interest at the time.

At the bottom of the page is a dominant "cover" story, again hitting a hot topic. At either side of the cover story would be a rotating series of features ... opinions from other newspapers/blogs/etc., guest columnists, secondary editorials, and most importantly, a daily dialogue with everyday local readers addressing a given topic.

Those involved in the dialogue could fall along the lines of youth vs. age, military vs. non- or former military, clergy vs. atheist, longtime residents vs. newcomers. A crucial component of this dialogue, and this page, would be the involvement of young writers ... high school and college journalism students, or young students/residents in general. I might give them three or four days of guest column spots to allow them to speak their minds in a traditionally "adults only" forum.

The bottom line with this kind of page would be flexibility. For example, the cover story could be moved all the way to the left or right according to the available art, or it could take up the entire bottom of the page. It could also expand to incorporate the two ancillary features —— in other words, the guest column and reader debate could become part of the cover story, as could the polls, editorial and letters at the top of the page for a one-theme blowout.

Ironically, the week after I put this together, my pal Dave Horn, a layout editor at the New York Times, pointed out their article on Michael Kinsley's shakeup of the Los Angeles Times' editorial pages. One hopes Mr. Kinsley and the LAT achieve the kind of success with a radical new approach that will engage readers and, in turn, allow other newsrooms to feel more comfortable taking truly innovative approaches to how a newspaper is put together.

Geoff Giordano
AME/News
The Journal News
White Plains, NY