I find myself hooked on a Web page offered by the Newseum — “the interactive museum of news” — that offers a look at hundreds of front pages from around the world.
The feature, called “Today’s Front Pages,” is a great resource for someone like me who is a page design junkie. As a newspaper editor responsible for designing and laying out front pages for the Post and Press, the chance to see what hundreds of other editors are doing is priceless.
I have my own sense of what works up front — large lead photo, for instance, a mix of headline fonts, a vertical layout and lots of “entry points” (teases and logos, small inset photos, etc.). Seeing others, however, can be instructive.
The Fresno Bee (left), for instance, offers a vertical page and a gripping photo of a distraught woman that accompanies a story about a fire. It also offers a small headshot at the bottom left that draws the reader to an otherwise nondescript government story. A very attractive page.
The Decatur Daily of Tennessee (top) scores (pun intended) with a winning layout that features a lot of horizontal art that is set off with a long vertical column down the right. What I like best, however, is the soccer photo that accompanies the lead story, which helps offset the lead truck shot.
The Herald Times (above right), though, has what I think is a key element — a photo of a face that covers a huge amount of front-page real estate. It also uses a long column on the right to elongate the page and a headshot to anchor the bottom story on the page.
The Newseum site is, for me, the equivalent of a comic-book message board or an Apple tech site — a place to do research, to get a sense of trends and a way to measure what I do against the industry.
South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick
Hank Kalet 