Redesigns should be going on 30

In the mostly frivolous movie 13 Going On 30, the main character, after jumping magically to age 30 and the physique of Jennifer Garner, works as a creative leader at a fashion magazine she practically worshiped as a pre-magic 13-year-old.

The magazine publisher, under escalating competitive pressure, tosses out a word and a prospect that sends the whole staff reeling in horror:

Redesign.

In this Hollywood-coated glimpse at the magazine world, the term signals utter failure and bleak chances for recovery.

I've spent most of my career in the newspaper industry, including several years as an editorial creative director. I don't remember redesign projects taking on that air of disaster. I loved doing them, if only because of the ego feed of feeling like an auteur, and in no small part because I did redesigns in an era full of ugly papers that really needed them. It was hard not to improve a paper under those conditions.

Sounds like Web sites circa, say, now. :-)

But that's the perspective I bring to the conversation about return on investment for newspaper redesigns, which started in part here and extended to NewsDesigner's timeline charts showing circulation of several papers before and after redesigns. Pepper in a spirited discussion of redesigns' effect on newspaper revenue, and you start seeing people's true colors.

I chipped in on that discussion, too -- it's worth the time to read the whole debate in the comments on NewsDesigner. Some excerpts follow.

Josh Crutchmer asked, as part of a longer and generally spot-on comment:

"True or false: We are in the business of attracting readers to our product?"

I replied, in part:

"False, Josh. ... First, what we do is not a 'product.' News, information, advertising ... all services. Pizza is a product, but its delivery is a service. All the printed newspaper, or a Web site, is is a delivery method.

"So what is our service mission?

"Our mission should be to enhance our respective communities by informing, entertaining and engaging them -- and enabling them to participate in all three.

"Attracting attention is easy. Strip down and run through town square if that's what you want.

"Engaging communities is hard. We place way too much faith in our own notions of 'news' as something that automatically engages people.

"The debate over whether redesigns move the needle, one way or another, in the newspaper business grows tiresome when we all fall back on our own job descriptions as excuses to keep thinking the way we always have.

"Designers seem to want excuses to keep on designing. Writers want to write. Editors want to edit. Ad sales execs want to keep selling space on paper. So they all just keep thinking the fault lies somewhere downstream from their work.

"... I'm especially disappointed in the design community for not looking beyond the typeface-of-the-month editorial projects and seeing the future. ... A redesign project in that world almost has to be holistic: news and ads, retail and classified, print and online, operations and business. Reinvention is more like it. I still hope the design community steps up to that much bigger challenge, and soon."

Josh replied, in part:

"Circulation figures are cited by publishers, CEOs and executive editors almost eithout fail every time a round of job cuts happens and another 250 people who have known nothing besides this as a career now have to support themselves and their families without a job.

"... So it may not be ideal for us to characterize our jobs so crassly. But ... I think in the minds of the people who sign our checks, we are in the business of attracting readers to our product."

Robb Montgomery added:

"When you have paper come in by the trainload on one end of the building and leave on hundreds of trucks on the other end you are most certainly delivering a product and providing a service.

"... Modernizing, improving your products and services is a cost of doing business in a consumer-savvy, branded culture. Only newspapers think it OK to do this every five to 25 years."

And I replied:

"... It's thinking about a newspaper as a product that results in that overemphasis on assembly line-style production.

"The 'product' is just the ink on the paper. If people just wanted ink and paper, they'd go to Office Depot for a much better selection. ;-)

"The 'service' is the information communicated by the forms that ink takes on paper, and the delivery of that information. We overinvest in tools and methods of delivering the ink on paper, and underinvest in tools and methods for delivering the information."

Newspapers have reached that oft-mentioned affluence of competence in design -- at least in the news/editorial columns. Meanwhile, they face daunting economic and social pressures to adapt the information services and business services they provide to address competitive threats and opportunities from the interactive world.

In that context, the concept of a purely news/editorial, purely ink-on-paper redesign project must go away. If that's a "redesign," the term should be as reviled in newspaper halls as it is in 13 Going On 30.

In its place, holistic reinvention of newspapers as community information, interaction and commerce services must ensue. And designers -- the very people most capable of creative, inventive, strategic thinking -- need to break out of their silos in newsrooms and ad departments to lead the charge.