Click the pic to link over to the video!
Fresh Loaf has discovered a video that shows off the AJC redesign that will hit newsstands May 2nd. (I’d post it here, but WordPress.com doesn’t support Brightcove videos.)
I’m still undecided on whether I like it. It definitely looks more fun! But is that a good thing?
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Looks just like USA Today.
ditto, usa today, if it is possible to dumb that paper down more than it is. i have never experienced a major metro newspaper with less in depth news.
It’s such a shame – this is the paper of Ralph McGill and Henry Grady.
And Jesse Outlar, and Celestine Sibley, and Furman Bisher, and Ernest Rogers…
it has been a sad shadow of its’ former self for many, many years.
How a paper looks isn’t really all that important. In fact, I’ve seen newspapers look like garbage and read almost like The New York Times. (The Valley News in New Hampshire, for instance.) To me, the redesign looks pretty sharp.
But you’re right. There will be less emphasis on in-depth reporting, which is kind of hilarious when they billboard “watchdog reporting” as a feature of the redesign. Watchdog reporting tends to be investigative in nature. With a greatly diminished staff, I doubt the paper’s ability to commit regularly to substantive watchdog reporting. So that seems like a lot of horse crap to me. (And if they do have more “watchdog” stuff, it will certainly come at the total expense of something equally vital.)
But the biggest thing about that video that got me was the final shot of the young couple spread out on the couch with the Sunday Journal-Constitution. It’s been a while since I’ve seen marketing so comically out of touch with its audience. If those two kids were clutching iMacs and reading ajc.com, then, yes, that might make some sense. I’m 25 years old. Most of the people I know are between 22 and 35 years old. I can count on one hand how many curl up like that with a broadsheet on Sundays. Maybe with The New York Times. Certainly not the AJC.
I love how the video ends like a Zaxby’s commercial.
I have been looking for a newspaper for my 18-month-old to start reading…the colors, the boxes, she will find it so fulfilling!
Yes, and how many 25 year olds actually care about what is happening in local government or would even read an in-depth watchdog story about revamping the sewer system in the City of Atlanta or a retrospective on Hosea Williams or Celestine Sibley’s musings on Big Bethel? How many 25 year-olds would even know who those people are? My experience is that a lot of people, even those who are involved in their neighborhoods, just don’t care & don’t stay informed & don’t read much of anything that doesn’t directly, specifically in a microcosmic way affect them. The decline of the paper is only reflecting the state of the community at large. You could chock the paper full of in-depth articles but who would really read them? All the “old” people who actually subscribe to newspapers and read it & pay attention to boring things like local government, school systems, the Braves, taxes, sewer systems, clean water, editorialists they disagree with, state government. And how much of that does the NY Times cover? Who is going to be a watchdog now that reporters won’t be generating the same volume of original material & reporting that bloggers, local TV & editorialists have come to rely upon?
You’re right….I was veering off topic, but all of those issues are interrelated. Was mainly thinking that a marketing campaign showing a young couple curled up w/ iMacs won’t necessarily draw people of that generation to read the AJC on-line or off. Secondarily a lot of people who curl up w/ the NY Times don’t necessarily keep up with local news. New designs & formats aren’t going to change that.
oldschool, I think you raise valid “chicken or egg” points, but its also kinda amusing since you’re posting these comments on a local news blog written by a 29 year-old who gets both a 7 day AJC and a “weekender” NY Times…and does indeed “curl up with it in the weekend!
Yeah! I’m more than happy to be proven wrong about those assumptions! I wish that it happened more often.
OK, I thought I kinda liked the new design.
Now that I’m looking at it in hard copy, it kinda looks like a neighborhood newsletter now. But that could just be my well-known hatred of bold, rounded fonts.
I, too, like to curl up with a newspaper and a cup of coffee on a Sunday. I take the AJC seven days a week. What I like about the new newspaper is that it is so much narrower than the old AJC, that I can easily read it without having to fold the paper. I have fairly short arms. But, it seems to lacking in depth. I am very happy, though, that we still have the AJC! I love reading newspapers.
As much as I enjoy, and even instigate, a good dog-pile on the AJC, I got a chance to read the new Sunday edition yesterday and have to offer some props.
I’m not saying it will or won’t save the business or the industry. But they’ve suggested their intent was to provide a Sunday paper conducive to a longer, more leisurely read, with greater depth and strong investigative reporting. If that’s the stick against which it should be measured then I gotta say, it was pretty well done. I haven’t devoted that much time to the Sunday AJC in ages.
And even old Lewis Grizzard
Ha! I knew it sounded oddly familiar!
Well, you’re sort of changing the subject. I was merely discussing the design and the marketing campaign. The questions you ask are all good, and I don’t think there are any answers to them. I’ve thought recently that perhaps the way newspapers covers things is the problem. Outdated maybe.
Regardless, I don’t know. Those are questions that will find answers over the next several years, I think.