Various things for your Friday afternoon:

NYT will add ragged-right to denote opinion in news pages. Chaos! Slippery slope! Next thing you know you’re The Morning Call!

Jim Jennings quits as Toronto Sun editor-in-chief. Jennings was an SND president back in the day. Says: “I worry about what will happen to the paper in the coming months.”

Plain Dealer’s Steven Beard to join Indianapolis Star. Huzzah!

Steven Heller-written obit on Tom Suzuki, influential textbook designer. “He had that important editorial designer gift — he actually read what he was designing for.”

Juan Antonio Giner’s ecstatic about the effect of Heller’s sabbatical on the design of the NYT Book Review. He’s got 10 suggestions for the Book Review. No. 10: “Fire Steven Heller.” Ooof!

Nova Scotia entrepreneurs to launch a PM tab. Will start at 10,000 copies a day, printed on the Halifax Chronicle Herald's presses. Also, word on the street in Toronto is that The Star’s downloadable PDF PM tab is doing better than expected. Ad positions sold out and lots of subway sightings.

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Ever wondered who’s giving advertisers the ideas for some of these wacky ad shapes of late? Answer: We are!

Check out this odd 18-page PDF at the Newspaper Association of America site.

“Adscapes” are the latest look in newspaper advertising. No longer are newspaper ads relegated to squares and rectangles. Today, advertisers can attract attention with a variety of shapes and sizes. Take a look at the latest looks.

Here’s the best one. It’s not even a real page! They just pasted it together — badly — from chunks of other pages!

Cripes. I hope they didn’t pay good money for that genius piece of PR.

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Wisconsin’s Oshkosh Northwestern (Gannett, 21,637) is letting the cat out of the ad stack. (Closer look)

Update: Brian points out the Gannett-owned Louisville Courier-Journal has been doing the same thing.

(Thanks, Donovan!)

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The Sacramento Bee has made some changes to its section front design, tweaking the mix of stories and promoting more stories inside the paper. (Above: Old page left, new page right)

[Robert Casey, the assistant managing editor for visuals,] said the intent of the front page redesign as well as similar changes made on the covers of Metro, Business, Sports and Scene (as well as weekly Sunday sections such as Forum) is to help time-frazzled readers navigate the paper.

Readership studies, Casey said, show that people often don’t know about interesting stories inside the paper but would read them if they did. People aren’t aware of these stories because papers have done a poor job promoting them.

As a result, the new front-page design includes what are called “teases” to “5 stories to talk about today” with short, snappy headlines and photos, all placed above the masthead. In fact, a photo is now sometimes integrated into the masthead; such tampering with the masthead was strictly off-limits in the past.

Not necessarily a bad thing, but with all the talk of “urgency” and “pressure to change” and newspapers being “in a fight,” is this sort of thing really enough? I’m not picking on the Bee specifically here. For all I know they’ve got grand plans in the works. But I see a lot of subtle, measured changes going on out there, and it seems to me that an industry that’s in a fight for its life needs to be doing more than tweaking. I’ll spare you the usual cliché.

>Public editor: Urgency to attract readers drives paper’s redesign [Sacramento Bee]

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It’s tomorrow in Bangkok, so here’s tomorrow’s Nation.

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Here are a few Thai front pages from today, as well as a couple from Hong Kong and Kuala Lumpur.

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DJ Stout, who was art director of Texas Monthly from 1987 to 1999, writes in Design Observer about how the famous 1992 Ann Richards cover came together.

The governor’s aide told me that Ann loved the motorcycle idea and she had suggested that we just “fake” the shot again. I was off to the races. We found the perfect white Harley and I hired commercial photographer Jim Myers to shoot the picture in his Dallas studio. I contacted a fashion designer in Smithville, who specialized in leather apparel, to make a customized leather motorcycle outfit, complete with leather fringe of course. Then we hired the same body double that we had used for the “Dirty Dancing” cover to pose as Anne’s body again. For many years after that issue of Texas Monthly was published, I would run into Ann Richards at my favorite Mexican food lunch spot in downtown Austin and she would always thank me for giving her such a “sexy body.” It had become an icon and a symbol over time of Ann’s character and her amazing legacy, even though it wasn’t a real photo of her. Years later, on Texas Monthly’s 30th anniversary, the readers of the magazine selected that cover of Ann on the Harley as the most memorable and beloved of all the covers that had been created throughout the magazine’s existence.

A great cover, but don’t try this if you’re Newsweek.

>DJ Stout: Remembering Ann Richards [Design Observer]

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Here’s what Norfolk’s Virginian-Pilot did with the Sept. 11 anniversary. It was a four-page wrapper.

Pilot Graphics Director Charles Apple writes:

This was what our subscribers – and our single-copy readers – saw.

Sam Hundley did the design. The brief essay was by ace writer Lon Wagner, our narrative team leader.

You’ll find the name of the paper at the very top of the page, in about 6.5-point type.

Sam says he was asked months ago to come up with something special. He started out using the numeral 5, but nothing clicked. Then, he went through sketches that used the tick marks. Suddenly, the solution leaped out at him.

Sam used this at the Illustration Summit in Evanston, Ill., in June “as an example of how your subconscious can find a solution before you see it yourself,” sam says.

He originally drew it as an A1 centerpiece. Deb Withey, the Pilot’s DME/Presentation, insisted on clearing off the rest of the page and letting the image stand alone, Sam says. “You have to give her a lot of credit for that. She really got behind it.”

We received nice feedback from both inside and outside the paper. A member of our ad department wrote our editor:

“This piece really made me reflect on what I was doing during this time. The cover alone really had an impression on me as to what had happened and how things have changed in our society.”

And a reader somewhat pessimistically wrote:

“This is what will be lost when the V-P eventually is gobbled up by one of the mega-monsters. Brilliance, art, poetry. Communication at the deepest level. Nice job, y’all.”

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Here are some Sept. 11 anniversary pages from the past couple days. More after the jump.

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For more Sept. 11, 2001 pages, the Newseum has a gallery of more than 100 pages, and Poynter has a couple hundred from Sept. 11 and 12.

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Looks like advertisers are embracing the “Hot L” treatment, if this page from today’s South Florida Sun-Sentinel is any indication.

Update: Jack Shafer writes in Slate today about ads on newspaper front pages and the hue and cry these (and other "imaginative") ads create.

Newspaper companies do experiment with ads, but mostly in their online ventures, which sends the message to advertisers and readers—the boomers-and-older generation still habituated to newspapers—that they've given print up for dead.

None of this is to suggest that the tired newspaper ad template can't sell goods and services. Of course it can. Indeed, one of the main reasons people read newspapers is to consume classified, real estate, and entertainment ads. But ask anybody who has ever tried to place a stimulating advertisement in a newspaper and you'll hear all about antiquated rules about ad location, size, configuration, and taste that are designed to prevent imaginative ads from running. Newspapers are as complacent in today's competitive ad market as they were when they held a near-monopoly over advertising.

>Front Page for Sale: Newspapers go back to the future [Slate]

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The Telegraph-Journal of Saint John, New Brunswick, launches a redesign today. Lucie Lacava consulted on the project.

Publisher James C. Irving said:

“The Telegraph-Journal is one of the most important papers in the Maritimes, and what Lucie has done is given it a design that reflects the importance and the stature of the paper.”

Lacava said the Telegraph-Journal’s previous understated design simplified her task.

“It gave us a good starting point,” she said. “The design was very old school and that of a small-town newspaper. My mandate, and what I wanted the design to do, was give it a more worldy look and make it look more like a big-city paper.”

On the typography front, the redesign uses Font Bureau’s Whitman Display for headlines and display, Font Bureau’s Vonnes (also used in last fall's Reforma Group redesign) for navigation and graphics and Porchez Typofonderie’s Le Monde Journal for body text.

They also published an eight-page special section section (PDF) on the redesign.

(Thanks, Adam!)

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Roger Black launched his new site today, including a weblog. Promises to be an interesting new space.

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Rupert Murdoch’s News International on Monday launched The London Paper, a free afternoon tab, joining Associated Newspapers’ London Lite, which debuted Aug. 25. Both have press runs of 400,000.

Kerry Capell writes in Business Week:

In addition to 11 daily British paid newspapers, there are now four free titles. Observers are already predicting a shakeout. “There are too many papers around for anyone to make a decent amount of money,” says Jim Wessenden, managing director of Wessenden Marketing, an independent media consultancy in London. “This will be a bloodbath.”

The Guardian’s Steven Brooks says of The London Paper:

London’s newest paper is an easy on the eye, judiciously compiled package of news, views and data giftwrapped in a well-designed, modernist package that is admirable in its restraint.

And Editor’s Weblog reports:

Media buyers were happier with the color-coded Murdoch publication, one saying “thelondonpaper looks cleaner and somehow more modern than Lite.”

Al Trivino, News International’s art director for new projects, said in an e-mail to NewsDesigner.com:

The challenge was to do something very British, very into the London culture but more European at the same time. Fresher. Bearing in mind the red-top tabloid culture it had to be younger, cleaner, more modern. I am very happy to see how the market is answering to that. ...

With regards of the fonts families used for this project, I tried to combine the look and feel of the classic and modern London with its multicultural tone. That’s why the combination of the sans serif Monitor with the zine slab and the Capitolium’s serif.

We are using Fred Smeijers’ Monitor and Monitor Condensed family (2002) for the masthead, headlines, and an alternative body copy font for facts, figures. For text, we are using a customised version of Capitolium (2006), from Gerard Unger. For headers, flashes and numbers we are using FF Zine Slab Display, from Ole Schäfer (2001)

More London Paper images, thanks to Al, after the jump.

>It’s war: thelondonpaper launches [Press Gazette]
>User-generated content in new London Lite [Fleet Street 2.0]
>London Paper hits the streets [The Guardian]
>A Newspaper Free-for-all Looms in London [Business Week]

(Thanks to Al, tball and Martin!)

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The Wall Street Journal today started running that front-page ad they announced in July. Vrooomm!

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