Tuesday's front page on Va. Tech
Some newspaper designers are second-guessing yesterday's front page treatment of the Virginia Tech massacre. Writes Jeremy Gilbert, design director at the Poynter Institute:
When you look at many of Tuesday's front pages, you'll notice that some of the same papers who did such a good job getting the stories online Monday failed to deliver a print edition building on what they had already published.
Newspapers are well suited to provide analysis and context. When events take place off the cycle of the printed publication, newspaper journalists get an opportunity to move the story forward.
In planning for Tuesday's paper, we talked about that very thing. The story was moving, shifting and evolving throughout the day and evening. One shooter or two? Was this caused by a domestic dispute or no? Despite wall-to-wall television coverage, it was hard to keep up with what happened when and how.
Our determination was that readers needed a single story that told clearly what happened and what students, witnesses and administrators said. They also needed a single narrative told by those who lived through it. And, because there are many local connections to Virginia Tech, they needed to know about the safety and thoughts of students from the Triad.
We went large with the photo we did because it was a strong image that provided a mopment in time that told of some of the action and violence of the day. We had photos from the memorial service we could have used as the main art -- we used a smaller photo --but they didn't really fit the overall mood of the coverage. We knew we would have plenty of photos of grieving students for today. The photos we had were on television, but TV moved through them quickly. They were online, too, as was virtually everything. We did not go with this photo because it was on our site most of the day and I saw it more often than any other on TV.
In fact, we wanted the newspaper to complement online, and online to complement the newspaper. (We had a prominent promo on the front directing readers to audio, video and the latest news online.)
Were we thinking of history rather than of readers? We were thinking of both. We wanted to help readers looking for perspective and narrative, as well as serve those who are looking for tomorrow's story.