Ready for lift off in Abu Dhabi

The National, Abu Dhabi's new English-language newspaper and website, is set to launch Thursday, April 17.
Editor-in-Chief Martin Newland told the Gulf region website Media ME: "the role of The National is to reflect society, help that society evolve and, perhaps most importantly, promote the bedrock traditions and virtues that must be preserved even in times of change and that is why we have called our paper The National."
The broadsheet will contain 80 pages of news, business, sports, culture and features coverage. An online version is also planned.
The design has been overseen by Montreal-based consultant and former SND president Lucie Lacava.
The National will have an editorial staff of about 200 and is designed to give Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates, a national voice. It is owned by an investment fund controlled by the Abu Dhabi government.
Many of the new paper's top staffers were hired away from newspapers in London, New York and Toronto, including design and production specialist Laura Koot from the National Post, and photo editor Brian Kerrigan from The Globe and Mail.

A bold new presence online

nationalpost.com and financialpost.com have become a whole lot prettier and so much more easy to use!

In the words of the editor-in-chief, Douglas Kelly:

We are proud to introduce you to a rebooted nationalpost.com and financialpost.com, two Web sites completely redesigned and reimagined with clarity and ease-of-use in mind.

The Post has never been known to hold back when speaking its mind. We remain true to form today as we make available to our Web site everything we produce from commentary to breaking news to business, arts & life and sports coverage, to award-winning design and photography — absolutely free. No subscriber walls, no complicated registration process: it’s never been easier for you to find and enjoy everything the National Post and Financial Post have to offer.

You will find the National Post newspaper peppered with mentions of online items providing background, documents and related items to our stories that appear in print.

On the new nationalpost.com, you’ll discover a commitment to delivering a more immediate, in-depth and customizable news experience that works for you and your busy life. You’ll find us telling the stories that matter to you most in new and different ways. We're introducing NP Network Blogs, which include established interactive blogs and news feeds like FP Trading Desk, Full Comment and Posted.

We're also committed to offering National Post and Financial Post content everywhere. You can experience our news and blogs on your BlackBerry or Windows Mobile-powered PDA using our free reader from Viigo.

And you’ll also find us opening the floor to different sources and viewpoints, including your own, because we know that online, we’re just one voice in the world’s most vast and vibrant community. Enjoy the new nationalpost.com and financialpost.com and all they have to offer.

For some before-and-after looks at nationalpost.com, take a look at this entry on the NP Editors blog.

Blackout no big deal at the National Post

As originally published on National Post's Posted news feed:

There are few things a newsroom needs more than electricity (coffee and a healthy sense of sarcasm are some of the other requisites). So we were amused when a blown transformer plunged the National Post newsroom, located in suburban Toronto, into darkness at around 3 p.m.

Here's a photo gallery of our unflappable newsroom working with the lights out.

The paper was produced on shared terminals operating off our emergency generator. There were a few lineups (including for pizza), but Wednesday's Post hit doorsteps right on schedule.

Photo: Foreground: Chris Watson, Executive Editor Financial Post -- Staff at National Post cope with a blackout after a power transformer flared up in an explosion on a Toronto Hydro powerline along Upjohn Road in the Toronto suburb of Don Mills, Ontario on Tuesday, October 23, 2007. The explosion caused a local power outage for the immediate area beginning in the mid afternoon just before 3 p.m.

The state of online journalism

The growing strength of visual online journalism will be on display at the Online News Association's annual conference in Toronto, Oct. 17-19. It comes a week after our own SND workshop in Boston, which also has a lot of strong content on the subject.

The ONA gathering will feature heavy-hitting speakers Hilary Schneider of Yahoo! and Michael Oreskes of the International Herald Tribune, an 'all-star superpanel' on the future of journalism, and workshops such as So You Want to Shoot Video? and Running a Digi-Newsroom on the Cheap.

Winners of the Online Journalism Awards will be announced at ONA's banquet at the Sheraton Centre. There are three Canadian finalists: The Globe and Mail in the General Excellence (Medium) category, cba.ca for news consumer reporting in the Service Journalism (Large) category, and the Toronto Star's Lost in Migration project for the Knight Foundation Award For Public Service.

Q+A: Richard Johnson, war illustrator

The National Post's Richard Johnson sketching in Afghanistan

Charles Apple serves up a treat this morning -- an in-depth Q-A with National Post war illustrator Richard Johnson. As reported earlier, Richard is home safely from his second tour in the Middle East and Charles gets him to dish on all kinds of details of his trip, from logistics, to reactions to inspirations... and tools:

Q. What tools did you use? How did you keep your pencils sharpened?

A. I use only one type of pencil and keep a whole bunch in my pocket at all times. They are a Prismacolor pencil. I sharpen them with a Leatherman I keep on my belt. They work very well in all kinds of conditions and are fairly impervious to over-rub smudging and sweat blotting. This also means that I cannot erase anything.

I used a digital camera to photograph the sketches each evening, and emailed them back to the National Post using a small satellite phone.

Read the full interview -- and see lots of cool behind-the-scenes photos and Richard's favorite sketches from the trip -- at VisualEditors.com.

Already booked in for SND's Boston workshop Oct. 11-13, but think you might need some more stimulation? The Association of Registered Graphic Designers of Ontario (RGD Ontario) is focusing its annual conference to reflect on design and its role in society and commerce the very next week, Oct. 17-19. DesignThinkers 2007, Canada's premier graphic design conference, will be a stimulating interactive thinkfest on the ideas of exciting innovators and Canada's vibrant design community in general.

What's RGD Ontario, you might be asking? It is the self-regulatory, professional body for graphic designers in Ontario grants the right to use designations Registered Graphic Designer and R.G.D., a quality signal of standards of professional practice. The association has approximately 2800 members.

Get all the poop on the conference on the DesignThinkers website

Oh, and while you are there, why not take a stab at RGN Ontario's online design quiz! Here's a tease: Know which logo, designed by Toronto graphic artist Allan Fleming, was called 'an icon' by media theorist Marshall McLuhan? Is it A, Bank of Montreal logo, B Canadian National Logo, or C, CBC logo?

Toronto Star befores and afters

Our friend stateside at newsdesigner.com posted no fewer than 13 before-and-after page pairs of the redesigned Toronto Star. (Including couple of links back north to SND's Canada Blog for earlier coverage.) Not much new reported here, but newsdesigner provides a great platform to compare and contrast the new with the old.

The experts weigh in

d

UPDATED Although there have not been too many comments here about the new Toronto Star, the paper itself published a column Friday discussing the merits of its own redesign. Antonia Zerbisias, in her Star.com media column, asked three industry 'experts' what they thought of the redesign.

Lucie Lacava, a Montreal-based design consultant and former SND presedent who authored the previous Star design, said it was not a "dramatic" remake, more of a stripped-down version of what she designed. Lacava questions why The Star dumped its "distinctive blue nameplate," which has left the paper "less distinctive, more generic. Perhaps `generic' is too harsh. It's been simplified a lot."

Sunni Boot, president of ad buyer ZenithOptimedia: "I love it. I really, really like it. It's very well designed, very easy to navigate."

Tony Sutton, president of News Design Associates: the new Star is "very, very readable." He told Zerbisias "my problem with it is, as always, and as one of your readers pointed out (in a letter), it looks like it's got less news in it."

Here's the link to the Zerbisias column.

And perhaps the before and after comparison above might encourage some further responses (pdf's can be viewed below). starsample-before.pdf starsample-after.pdf

Toronto Star redesigns

The redesigned Toronto Star hit the streets today, with a cleaner look, larger body type and a pared-down selection of sections. Gone is the distinctive blue ribbon behind the flag (replaced by a smaller one just above) and soon to be gone is another inch in width as the paper gradually shrinks to 11.5 x 22 inches by October. The paper's local section has been rolled into the main A section and the various lifestyles sections (Food, Fashion) have been rolled into one section, titled "Living." Thestar.com also got a minor tweak and clean-up.

Body type is custom-designed Torstar Text, set at 10.25 points on 11 points of leading. Read more about the changes in their on-line readers guide.
Editor-in-chief J. Fred Kuntz promises:

• A renewed emphasis on local coverage. We are dedicating most of the A section to news from the Greater Toronto Area.
  A new World & Comment section.


• Simpler and clearer naming of sections. For example, it's Living six days a week, instead of I.D. or Food or Fashion or Health or Shopping. And it's Entertainment instead of Buzz or Movies or What's On.


• Don't get us wrong ‚Äì changing section names does not mean dropping content. We still continue to bring you topnotch coverage of food and fashion and health. It's all there in Living.


• And on Saturdays, the Weekend Living section will be wide-ranging, with more pages and all of the great content that was in the former Life and Shopping sections.

No response from readers yet posted on-line, but feel free to have at it here.

STAR PREVIEWS ITS NEW LOOK

The Toronto Star has let the cat out of the bag. While most papers go to great lengths to keep their redesign projects top secret until the big day, the Star rolled out a two-page redesign readers' guide in its Saturday and Sunday editions, complete with images of sample sections fronts constructed on a five-column grid and a new body type sample, more than a week before its May 28 launch. See pdf here


The readers' guide lays out four key changes:
1 'Bigger body type': The Star's custom Torstar Text will increase in size from 9.9 over 10 to 10.25 over 11.
2 'Easier to handle': The Star will gradually move to a 11.5 inch page from the existing 12.5 inch size over the next five months.
3 'Focus on local news': The Star is moving Greater Toronto News "to the front of the line" A-section, made way by creating a new section for world news and comment.
4 'New and improved daily sections': The Star will expand coverage of lifestyles in a new Living section, focusing on health, food, family, relationships and other topics.

In a Saturday Star A2 column, Editor-in-Chief Fred Kuntz admitted that many readers dislike change. "But no newspaper should stagnate," he said. "We will embrace any change that heightens your enjoyment of the newspaper."

"That's why we began this project by improving our understanding of readers -- and seeing how every reader is different. Many will jump to their favourite section first. Some are fans of one columnist, or devotees of certain puzzles or comics. With 2.9 million Star readers a week in print and online, that's a lot of interests to satisfy.

"We conducted in-depth readership surveys, and met with groups of readers in person to review our plans."

WINNING PORTFOLIO

NNA UPDATE Here are Genevieve Biloski's winning pages from the National Newspaper Awards in Winnipeg on May 19. Genevieve, who won the presentation category, is a designer for the National Post's daily Arts & Life section andweekly Toronto magazine. She has been at the paper since February 2006 and this is her first NNA. Previously she was a designer at Maclean's for 3 years. She graduated from the Ontario College of Art & Design in 2005.

The other nominees were Cinders McLeod of The Globe and Mail and Philippe Tardif of La Presse.

Congratulations again, Genevieve!

'Sleeker' Star: new sections, larger type, increased local coverage

The Toronto Star plans to roll out a dramatic redesign on Monday, May 28.

Word is the Star is thrilled by how fast the project, headed up by design boss Charlie Kopun, was pulled together - less than five months.

"Newspapers typically take a few years to go through this process, but it seems inconceivable in this day and age to take that long to bring a new version to market," said Star publisher Jagoda Pike. "So we said we were going to change the cycle and get out to market as quickly as we can."
The new-look Star is expected to feature:

• Bigger body type - 10.25 over 11;


• Cleaner crisper headlines with sections clearly labeled and colour-coded;


• A move towards an 11.5-inch page, a first for major North American broadsheets;


• Enhanced local news coverage with Toronto and GTA content moving to the A section;


• A new World & Comment section, published Monday through Saturday;


• A new daily and weekend Living section.

In a story that ran in the Star on May 3, Jagoda Pike said the increase in body type size will translate into less content in "some cases," but the editorial team is countering that issue by experimenting with smaller headlines.

"We are going to use the space more effectively for good storytelling," editor-in-chief Fred Kuntz said. "I'm not interested in story count or number of words. The most important thing is to hit the topics that readers are most interested in."

Jagoda Pike also announced a move towards modular adverstising, starting in January. "We are the only medium that sells ads by any size," she said.

Links:
Star news release
Star story
And story on Media in Canada site

REDESIGN CHATTER

NewsDesigner's posting on The Globe and Mail's redesign is generating a lot of action in the comment department. Last we looked, there were 60 posts, including a few, er, colourful exchanges between Toronto type designer Nick Shinn and a couple of other commenters. As SND vice prez Gayle Grin says, it's an "incredible dialogue," so check it out if you missed it.
And there is the equally active (60 comments over two pages) thread over on Typophile

TONIA COWAN JOINS THE GLOBE

Tonia Cowan will join The Globe and Mail's visual operation as graphics editor beginning Monday, May 28. Tonia began her career with Canadian Press before moving to New York where she spent six years with the Associated Press and four years with Newsweek prior to returning to Canada to join The Toronto Star in 2003.
Tonia holds a B.A. in fine art with a minor in political science from McMaster University in Hamilton, Ont. Her work has been recognized by the Society for News Design and the Malofiej International Infographics Awards. She also created several graphics for Charles Hanley's Pulitzer Prize winning No Gun Ri story.