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New logo: The Society of News Design has unveiled its new logo, reflecting the global nature of its mission and membership. Starr Report disrupts SND, where job market was brisk
PHILADELPHIA -- A vanload of documents and 445 pages of text with nary a graphic in sight sidetracked the Society of News Design's annual meeting held here Sept. 10-12, but SND still managed to unveil its new logo and new name, and promote its international flavor.
Attendance, already down slightly this year due to scheduling conflicts with other news organizations, took another hit when Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr sent the House Judiciary Committee his 445-page cover letter and its supporting documents. Several SND panelists were no-shows and audiences were depleted by the sound of beepers, followed by sheepish grins and waves good-bye as designers were called back to work.
Attendance was about 700, although the official tally is still out while SND issues refunds and counts "leave earlies" attributable to the Starr Report.
Lynn Staley, SND president and design director of Newsweek, had to bow out as Friday's keynote speaker to help that magazine prepare for the report. Sharon Russell, the assistant managing editor for design at The Star-Ledger in Newark, N.J., never made it down the turnpike, even though her business cards and recruitment material did.
And Joseph Hutchinson, AME for design and graphics at The Sun of Baltimore, commuted between Philly and Baltimore, staffing The Sun's recruiting booth and being a panelist by day, and working on the Starr report at his paper by night.
Nevertheless, quite a bit got accomplished. "It was a busy meeting for us," said David Gray, SND's executive director. "We unveiled the new logo, made some committee changes, added some workshops, created a new chapter and approved a budget."
Gray was quite proud of the group's international flavor. Translators were provided for each workshop. Region 15 (SND/Dach) was created, ushering in Germany, Switzerland and Austria. Plans for next year's meeting in Copenhagen were firmed up. The group approved plans to meet in 2002 in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Also approved was a new contest for new media, focusing on excellence in web page design. It is scheduled to start in 1999.
The Internet was a hot topic at this year's conference, with one of the all-day workshops on Thursday focusing on new media. It offered how-tos and tips for web sites as well as design do's and don'ts from usability guru Jakob Nielsen, and a hands-on session led by Rochelle Lavin, formerly of the St. Petersburg Times in Florida.
Lavin assigned audience members to teams and told them to mock up a web site explaining either the stock market drop or problems at the White House. Most participants chose the White House, in part for its humorous aspects.
One team came back with a site named "The Oral Office," including a timeline (Bill and Monica's Excellent Adventure), a gift shop (Best Listening Devices) and an interactive game (Mr. President Head, based on Mr. Potato Head, using the facial features of major players).
Although many of the usual suspects won in the existing categories, the best of show award went to El Mundo Metropoli, Madrid, Spain, for the body of work of Art Director Rodrigo Sanchez.
Awards, smwards
All told, the judges handed out more than 800 awards in various categories, prompting a spirited debate at the Friday morning business meeting on the value of awards in general and the SND competition in particular.No one changed position, leaving the status quo intact.
"Some people use the contest book as a how-to guide," Gray said, "and some use it when they are job-hunting. But the intent of the contest is to reward good work and show it to others."
Job hunting, or more accurately job-filling, headed many attendees' lists. Job-seekers were invited to cocktail parties, booths were set up in the hallways and four-by-eight-foot bulletin boards were plastered with help-wanted signs ("We Promise You Won't Freeze," the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel vowed).
"It is harder to hire people," said Baltimore's Hutchinson. "There is a real shortage of people who do graphics and design for newspapers. I describe it as a crisis."
Like other managers at the SND meeting, Hutchinson scouted the halls, touting his paper's commitment to design, the community as a good place to live -- and most anything else it took to lure prospective employees.
"Our job bank has 200 job listings going unfilled," said Gray. "Newspapers, compared to a lot of other things you want to do with your life, don't fare too well."
The hallways at SND's convention were filled with newspaper booths as companies tried to get the names of prospects, if not actually fill jobs, with designers and managers from the Chicago Tribune, the New York Times and Gannett Co. Inc. vying with The Star-Ledger, Knight Ridder and the San Diego Union-Tribune for the attention of designers, artists and students.
"The meat market kind of took us by surprise," Gray said. "Baltimore set up a booth outside one of the sessions three years ago and they were swamped. It caused traffic problems.
"We were slightly better prepared last year in San Diego, and this year we sold booth space to vendors and newspapers," he said.
William Hidlay, editor of Gannett's Courier-Post in Cherry Hill, N.J., made the trek across the river to man Gannett's booth and drum up interest in designing for the organization.
"There is a huge demand for graphic artists and designers," Hidlay said. "We had an opening for a year that we could not fill. A lot of younger designers and students are going to the Web."
Other attendees said the Internet had siphoned off designers, and it came at a time when newspapers are particularly desperate. Newspapers have diverted newsroom staff to work on their own web sites, and the quest for readers has led to higher demand for infographics, design techniques and new sections.
"Many newspapers five or 10 years ago didn't have a design desk," Hutchinson said. "Now there is heavy competition among newspapers, papers themselves have more opportunities, and there are new technologies like web design that draw people away."
Russell, stuck in Newark dealing with the Starr Report, made sure her Star-Ledger business cards and recruitment information made it to the meeting.
"It took six months to fill our last graphics job. Ten years ago, we were a dime a dozen," Russell said. "The Internet sucked away a lot of our artists. If you are good, you can work anywhere."
Pizza parties
Thomas Moraitis, creative director of Apartments.com of Chicago, was at SND looking for talent himself."We're owned by newspapers, and like them, we have a hard time filling jobs," Moraitis said. "We need designers, copy writers and art directors for our sites, too."
In addition to working his booth, Moraitis was scouting the halls as well as searching out talent and greeting friends at a pizza-and-portfolio party hosted by the Chicago Tribune, one of the founders of Apartments.com. Attended mostly by students, it gave Tony Majeri, the Tribune's senior editor for design, and some of his staff the chance to look over portfolios from a wide range of students and designers they wouldn't ordinarily see.
The attendees got pizza, soda, a chance to win baseball tickets, and contacts and career suggestions.
Downstairs in one of the meeting rooms, the New York Times was hosting a slightly tonier cocktail party while the paper's graphics editor, Charles Blow, and members of his staff displayed recent works, critiqued them and discussed what did and did not work.
Similar scenes were played out elsewhere in the hotel as newspapers tried to deal with the need for skilled news designers in a tight job market. And the skills demanded of the new designer are broad and deep these days.
In the mid-'80s, newspapers were troubled by the need to find copy editors who were comfortable enough with technology to work on some of the early pagination systems. In the late '90s, that need not only has not been diminished, it also has been surpassed by the need to find designers who can think like journalists, use computers, draw -- and exercise news judgment. Marilyn Weaver, who runs the design program at Ball State University in Muncie, Ind., said newspapers, like other businesses, needed graduates who do not need extensive training.
"Newspapers don't want to hire artists who don't understand news values," Weaver said. "And like every other business, they want people who can hit the ground running -- the software skills and news and art, all rolled into one."
Weaver said she knew her students could go someplace other than newspapers. "Students strong in design can apply those skills in a magazine or in other fields, but we address this niche," she said.
George Berke, design director of The Times-Picayune in New Orleans, has been a beneficiary of Weaver's program. "We have kind of an agreement with them. We've gotten an intern or two," Berke said.
Berke, who also posted a help-wanted note on the bulletin boards, said The Times-Picayune was doing some recruiting at SND. "We're looking, but we don't do as much at this as the bigger papers like the [New York] Times do."
Weaver and her students were quite popular in the artist-starved atmosphere, with recruiters and managers lighting up every time they saw a name badge that said "student."
The biggest problem is, it's a little program. "We have more papers come to us than we have grads," Weaver said. "We're not cranking out hundreds of kids, and only have 29 in our junior and senior years."
Weaver said part of the shortage comes from the nature of morning papers: "A lot of people hate the hours. They want a life."
"Working on the Web means having the luxury of working during the day and have a night life," said Hutchinson. "Our news design desk is tied to the news, so it's a night job. You have to have a love of journalism to take a job like that. Being in competition with other industries like the Web, it's a hard sell."
-- Steven E. Brier
Society
of News Design,
401-276-2100;
e-mail: snd@snd.org.See also Awards reflect SND's new global nature
From THE COLE PAPERS, October 1998, Copyright © 1998, All Rights Reserved.
Last modified: July 24, 2008
