The Society for News Design has announced the “World’s Best-Designed Newspapers.” They are:

• Akzia in Moscow, daily, circulation 200,000
• Expresso in Paco de Arcos, Portugal, daily, circulation 140,000
• Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung in Frankfurt, Germany, weekly, circulation 320,000
• The Guardian in London, daily, circulation 355,750.

More details, videos, etc., here.

Also, the full database of all SND winners is now online. Update: Well, I guess it's not anymore. Tomorrow, they say. Update2: It's up now!

The SND competition’s winners database is up and running. And the annual post-contest what’s-the-point-of-the-whole-thing-anyway thread is raging on at Visual Editors.

Update: They’ve also updated the awards totals for the top winners:

• Los Angeles Times and its magazine, 107


• The New York Times and its magazine, 99


• Excelsior of Mexico City, 72


• Hartford Courant, 57


• San Jose Mercury News, 55


• The Boston Globe and its magazine, 52


• South Florida Sun-Sentinel, 47


• La Presse in Quebec, Canada, 43


• The Plain Dealer in Cleveland, 40


• El Mundo of Madrid, Spain, and its magazines, 40


• National Post in Toronto, 38


• The Guardian in London, 35


• The Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk, 35


• San Francisco Chronicle, 28


• Gazette in Montreal, 23


• Clarin in Buenos Aires, 22


• The Dallas Morning News, 22


• Politiken in Copenhagen, 22

SND has announced the winners of Gold medals in the Best of Newspaper Design Creative Competition. They are: The Virginian-Pilot, Welt Am Sonntag, The New York Times Magazine, Palm Beach Post, The New York Times, El Mundo, Excelsior and El Mundo again. SND’s contest blog has more images. The Pilot page that won (above, by Sam Hundley) generated a lot of discussion when I posted it last fall.

SND has announced the World’s Best-Designed Newspapers. They are: Äripäev of Tallinn, Estonia; El Economista of Madrid, Spain; Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung of Frankfurt, Germany; and Politiken of Copenhagen, Denmark.

Update: And the (tentative) top ten winners list:

1. The New York Times (and its magazines)


2. Los Angeles Times (and its magazine)


3. Excelsior [Mexico]


4. Hartford Courant


5. San Jose Mercury News


6. The Boston Globe (and its magazine)


7. The South Florida Sun-Sentinel


8. La Presse [Montreal]


9. The (Cleveland) Plain-Dealer


10. El Mundo (and its magazines) [Spain]

updated.

Kenney Marlatt, manning the SND International Web Desk at the SND contest judging in Syracuse, spotted a huge entry from the LA Times and recorded it on video, complete with the perfect musical counterpoint.

It snowed in Syracuse, just a little, originally uploaded by Steve313.

The massive undertaking that is the judging of the Society for News Design's Creative Competition is getting underway this weekend in sunny Syracuse. They're promising blog coverage, Flickr coverage and YouTube coverage. So it's almost like being there! Except for, you know, the 12 feet of snow. And the beer.

Speaking of the SND contest, Kris Kinkade, design editor at The Kalamazoo Gazette, has just been named coordinator for the 28th edition of the competition, which will be judged in February 2007.

Every year the Society for News Design's Best of Newspaper Design competition prompts plenty of strong opinions. It's hailed as a fine snapshot of some of the best and most inspiring work in our industry. It's damned as a navel-gazing, self-absorbed, out-of-touch group grope.

For his part, Alan Jacobson thinks it could be better. He says the contest should promote design that matters to readers, and he's writing about it for SND's Design magazine. He's got a draft here.

"The mission of the Society for News Design is to enhance communication around the world through excellence in visual journalism." These aren't my words - they come directly from SND's website. I assume that "communication" and "journalism" require readers. So let's change SND's competition to support, promote and fullfill that mission � for readers.

Update: See also this active Visual Editors discussion.

>It's time to redesign the Society for News Design [BrassTacks Design]

The SND site says that the results database for the Best of Newspaper Design Creative Competition should be online at about 7 p.m. EST today.

Update: As Steve points out, it's now set for 7 p.m. EST Monday.

Update, 8:30 p.m. PST 3/5: The database is live.

The judges of the recent SND Best of Newspaper Design competition have unanimously awarded Judges' Special Recognition to the staffs of The Times-Picayune of New Orleans and the Sun Herald of Biloxi, Miss., for their coverage of Hurricane Katrina.

"People talk about making a newspaper a vital party of the community and these newspapers fulfilled that function stunningly after this devastating hurricane leveled the towns they serve," judge Cory Powell said. "That they managed to make such great work in the middle of it all humbles us.”

The New York Times won a record 85 awards in the just-completed SND Creative Competition, NewsDesigner.com has learned. Sixty of those went to the Times, and 25 to the Times Magazine. The LA Times clocked in at 71 for second place. The previous record was last year's 77 by the LAT.

The current count on the SND page has 1,128 total awards, including 50 Silvers and nine Judges Special Recognitions. The top winners, alphabetically, were Boston Globe, El Mundo, Hartford Courant, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Plain Dealer, Publico, San Jose Mercury News, South Florida Sun Sentinel and Toronto Star.

Update: Matt Mansfield writes in to note that these are not "official" numbers. Things haven't been double-checked yet, so things could change.

The Society for News Design contest judging is done for the year, and they've announced the winners of the World's Best Designed Newspapers portion (which was actually judged last week). There are only two this year:

The Guardian, London, U.K. daily, circulation: 395,000
Rzeczpospolita, Warsaw, Poland, daily, circulation: 180,000

Press release is here.

In the main contest, there were, for the first time in 25 years, no gold medals awarded. The 1,055 1,128 other winners include 46 50 silvers and seven nine Judges' Special Recognition Awards. The 10 papers with the most awards, in alphabetical order, are: Boston Globe, El Mundo, Hartford Courant, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Plain Dealer, Publico, San Jose Mercury News, South Florida Sun Sentinel and Toronto Star.

The judging of the Society for News Design's annual competition begins today in Syracuse. The SND website promises "live updates all weekend," so check that out if you're so inclined.

*Update: They're up and running and even announcing winners. There's also photos, videos and even blogs. Also a web cam (which won't work for me). Fine work by the SND International Web Desk. (Note to the SNDIWD since you don't have an e-mail address: Your blogs' RSS feeds are farked! Something with that second all-caps SNDJUDGING in the addresses.) Looks like most of the bugs are ironed out. Chapeau!

In the April issue of the Society for News Design's Update newsletter (PDF), judges of the recent SND contest were asked to share what trends they saw in the entrants. One of the news and sports judges, Marcy Mangels of The (White Plains, N.Y.) Journal News, said:

The most annoying trend was the obvious copying of a technique or gimmick. There were several papers with GIANT fingerprints used as icons in cold case kind of stories.

NewsDesigner.com's SND Winners' Gallery is now live! There are currently about 40 winners and close to 100 pages. If you've got a winning page, photo or graphic, e-mail it to me. Don't let your competition get all the attention!

And comments are enabled, so feel free to leave some, especially if you were a judge.

>26th Edition SND Winners [NewsDesigner.com]

Layne Smith, one of the Dallas Morning News artists who worked on the NASCAR hauler graphic disqualified at the SND contest, has posted a spirited defense of the graphic and his integrity, and calls on the judges to further explain their decision.

Hell yeah we bully the judges into enlightening us. How many years have hundreds of us flipped through page after page after page of award winning designs and graphics thinking "WTF were the judges thinking!?" Reinforcing the belief that the judging process consists of some secret society of SND glad-handers, real or perceived, is a big mistake.

I stand before you all to defend myself and my decisions. Yet the judges are somehow safe from that responsibility? They can judge the work that defines who a lot of us are and then shrink back into the shadows and watch the sparks fly? As the single most responsible party for this whole fiasco, you can bet I have every right to call them out. Those who know me know I love to learn, I love to help others learn. That's why I'm here. That's why they should be here too.

VisualMente today reports on a Dallas Morning News graphic about a NASCAR hauler that was on the verge of winning a silver award at the SND competition when one of the judges noticed that incorporated into the graphic was the logo of NewTek, a company that makes the 3-D program Lightwave. The entry was disqualified. Judges say they thought it crossed an ethical line, and Morning News staffers say they were just trying to add logos to give the illustration a sense of the reality of a heavily sponsor-driven sport.

VisualMente has extensive responses, in English, from Jeff Goertzen, who was one of the judges, and Chris Morris, art director at the Morning News. Here are a couple of excerpts:

Jeff Goertzen:

At first we were all stunned, but as reality sank in, we knew the implications this would have on the entry. NewTek is the company that makes the 3-D program Lightwave and is the program of choice for many informational graphics artists in the newspaper industry, including the artists of the Dallas Morning News. In fact, NewTek is a co-sponsor of the Lightwave workshops organized by the Dallas Morning News and SND. As these facts surfaced in our discussion between our panel of judges and supervisors, it became obvious that there was a serious breach of ethics with this entry. Ultimately the graphic was disqualified.

Richard Curtis, USA Today graphics editor who was of the judges on the panel said, "If one of my artists had done this, he or she would have been fired."

I've always emphasized that informational graphics are every bit as much a part of journalism as the stories we print in our papers. Our work must be 100 percent credible. The facts must be accurate and the content believable. Can a graphic be libelous? Can it slander? Can it pleagarize? Of course it can. And this graphic by the Dallas Morning News was no exception to the rules of journalism. And the judges were in agreement with that.

What do you think about the disqualification of the graphic by the SND judges? Do you agree and understand their reasons?

We felt it was extreme. Giving "shout-outs" to friends, family, etc. in published work is not unheard of in the history of journalism, but it is not practiced here and would not be tolerated. In this case, it was an image that DEMANDED colorful, logo decorations and the NewTek logo was one of many we placed into the graphic. But we did not do so with any motives other than splash of color and corporate identity "feel".

If the judges felt we were attempting to "connect" with this software company, that is their choice. But there is also an Amoco logo on the graphic and we also added EDS, a local Fortune 500 company. We stood to gain nothing from the petroleum company and expect nothing from EDS. We simply needed logos. But because the software we used to draw the graphic happened to be NewTek's creation, there was a connection that was too close for comfort for the judging panel. Note: A close friend was a member of that panel, and he voted to disqualify the graphic. He said it was one of the better graphic pieces in the show, and it pained him to vote to eliminate the graphic, but he felt it crossed an ethical line. Again, I think it can be interpreted many ways, in varying degrees. But without any chance to explain, I think the image screamed exploitation to those who KNEW it was the NewTek logo, and probably extrapolated that we gained in some way by displaying the logo as we did. We did not. It was just readily available.

Regardless of what the judges say or feel now, the intent of including the icon was not something that could be considered since we had no way of knowing the artists' intent. Anything about intent was dismissed by the contest coordinator (me) on its face in the discussion. The judges were also asked to prove that it was the Newtek logo and given internet access to do so.

Basically the question of disqualification came down to this: Was it an ethical breach to include the logo regardless of intent or other circumstances? Knowing that inclusion of the icon was the only thing they could consider the judges answer was yes.

>Ethics Of Journalism Must Apply To Graphics (Jeff Goertzen) [VisualMente]
>About the Hauler graphic (Chris Morris) [VisualMente]

Win an SND award? I'm creating a gallery of winners. Hit the "Contact" link over on the right and send me a jpeg or pdf of the page(s) and, if you like, some words about the entry. And congrats!

The database of Society for News Design contest winners is up and waiting for your tender searches. Be gentle!

Judges for the Society for News Design's 26th contest loved L.A. again this year. The Los Angeles Times again dominated the contest, winning a record 77 awards, 13 more than the impressive 64 they won last year. Here's the breakdown from SND (full press release after the jump):

The top 10 winners in all 21 categories were the Los Angeles Times and its magazine, 77 awards; The New York Times and its magazine, 60; The Boston Globe and its magazine, 49; El Mundo of Madrid and its magazines, 49; Chicago Tribune and its magazine, 39; Hartford Courant, 38; San Jose Mercury News, 38; Plain Dealer, Cleveland, Ohio, 34; South Florida Sun-Sentinel, Fort Lauderdale, 23; and National Post in Toronto, 22.

Of the 190 newspapers from 29 countries winning awards, the U.S. led with 697 awards, followed by 94 for Spain, 58 for Canada, 45 for Mexico, 35 for Portugal, 30 for Germany, 29 for Sweden, 16 for El Salvador, and 11 for Brazil. Other award winners included newspapers from Argentina, China, Denmark, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, England, Estonia, Finland, Hong Kong, Japan, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Panama, Peru, Poland, Republic of China, Scotland, Switzerland and Turkey.

*Update: 77 awards is apparently a record.

Judges at the recently judged Society for News Design's 2005 Creative Competition awarded six Gold awards, NewsDesigner.com has learned. SND defines a Gold as an "award granted for work that defines the state of the art. Such an entry should stretch all limits of creativity. It should be impossible to find anything deficient in a gold-winning entry. It should be as perfect as humanly possible. Very few of these awards are given. Judges were asked to be very selective and look for total perfection in awarding a Gold Medal for the category entered."

Gold award winners are:

Die Zeit
Special Coverage/Sections/Multiple Sections with Advertising (Category 10Bb)
Leben sections on parenthood
(more images after the jump)

San Jose Mercury News
Special News Topics/The Athens Olympics (5A)
(more images after the jump)

Indigena
Feature Design/Entertainment Page (7Cc)
John Holmes page
(best image available; the hands are not part of the page, but the person holding the page; a full, more amusing version of that image here)

Cleveland Plain Dealer
Special section cover (10Ca)
ABCs of investing

Los Angeles Times Magazine
Portrait Photography (17E)
A life in the balance portrait

The Globe and Mail
Use of Photography (17L)

More images after the jump and tk, I hope.

SND has announced the World's Best Designed Newspapers portion of the contest. They are:

Die Zeit, Hamburg, Germany, circulation: 450,000
Der Tagesspiegel, Berlin, circulation: 150,000
Svenska Dagbladet, Stockholm, circulation: 189,000
The Hartford Courant, circulation: 250,000
Marca, Madrid, circulation: 386,413

Die Zeit has probably been on the list the most, also making it in 1998, 1999, 2001 and 2002.

I'm happy to see Marca, one of my favorites, on the list. The judges especially noted their display after March 11 (shown above).

The rest of the awards, which were judged separately by different judges, should be announced in a few weeks.

There is a VisualEditors.com discussion thread underway here.

Congrats to all!

>World's Best-Designed Newspapers� for 2005 [SND]

The judging of the 26th Society for News Design contest begins this weekend in Syracuse (forecast: Cloudy with snow. Cold. High 18F. Winds WNW at 15 to 25 mph. Chance of snow 90%. 3 to 5 inches of snow expected), and Jay Small (aka the SND International Web Desk) will be blogging live from the judging. They've enabled comments on the weblog entries, so it should be an interactive affair. They will not, however, tell you if you won anything, consarn it.

Note: This was posted here earlier.

I've been planning to follow up on my SND contest numbers post and the issue of photography awards. And now I've been goosed by this discussion at visualeditors.com. Maybe this has been beaten to death in Design mag or somewhere, and I've just missed it. (I'll confess that I have, at times, been a bit off-and-on with my SND membership, depending on my employer's willingness to pony up the scratch, my own solvency or just my general mood about Life, the Universe and Everything.) But it seems it might be worth a wider discussion. Especially now that we got this shiny new internet thingie.

Anyway, I was a bit surprised by the 2003 photo numbers (5 percent of award categories, 17 percent of all awards and 58 percent of Gold awards). For comparison, here are some quick numbers from the SND databases and annuals.

Percentage of SND awards that were for photography:
1985: 8.9
1986: 6
1988: 9.2
1989: 8.6
1990: 6.4
1991: 6.8
1992: 6.2
1993: 10.5
1994: 7
1995: 7.4
1996: 6.3
1997: 4.4
1998: 5.7
1999: 5.8
2000: 11
2001: 7.4
2002: 11
2003: 17

Regardless of the numbers, there's a question here. It is a design contest. Should there be photography awards in it?

But would you ditch all the categories? Or keep the photo series stuff? Or photo illustrations?

First, let me say I'm a big fan of our photo pals, and surely we could not do what we do without them. (We'd get sick of big type treatments pretty dang fast.) I often stand in awe of what they do. And I'm certainly not the only one who's been inspired by great photography to do better design.

But as is perpetually the case these days, newsroom budgets are tight. I suspect that most editors don't enter every page their staff throws their way in January, but edit down the entries to the ones they think have the best shot. So one could understand how designers and artists might, in the deep, deep dark of night, slightly begrudge a chunk of the limited pie going to the photogs. They do have their own big ol' contest. Not to mention their own Pulitzer categories.

I'm taking the coward's way out at the moment and saying I'm really not sure yet where I come down on this. But I'd like to hear what y'all think. Also, I'd be interested in whatever institutional SND memory there may be out there on past discussions about this.

Here are some interesting numbers culled from the database of SND winners:

Number of categories: 182
Percentage of categories that were for photography: 5
Percentage of awards that were for photography: 17
Percentage of Gold awards that were for photography: 58
The number of judges (excluding the five World's Best Designed Newspaper judges): 21
The number of judges who work for newspapers: 13
The number of judges whose newspapers won no awards: 4
Circulation of the smallest paper to win a Gold award (Journal News, Spencerville, Ohio): 2,200
Number of other awards the World's Best Designed Newspapers won:

Puls Biznesu: 0
Upsala Nya Tidning: 0
Glasgow Herald: 1
Independent on Sunday: 6
R�cord: 20

*No worries on the name, SND buddies! I'm impressed you can give us all that info at all. Good job!

SND finally got their pesky database working. So go take a gander at the winners!

>25th Edition Winners [SND]

SND has announced the awards, but their big database isn't quite up and running, so you can't do an ego search for your name yet. Here's what they do have:

The top five winners in all 21 categories were the Los Angeles Times with 64 awards; The New York Times and its magazine with 48 awards; the Chicago Tribune, The Boston Globe and El Mundo (Madrid, Spain), including their magazines, 26 awards each; and the San Jose Mercury News with 24 awards.

Of the 203 newspapers from 32 countries winning awards, the U.S. led with 565 awards, followed by 95 awards for Spain, 50 for Canada, 46 for M�xico, 32 for Sweden, and 30 for Germany. Other award winners included newspapers from Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Denmark, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, England, Estonia, Finland, France, Guatemala, Honduras, Hong Kong, Japan, Norway, Peru, Poland, Portugal, Republic of China, Russia, Scotland, Singapore, Switzerland, Taiwan, The Netherlands and Turkey.

Judges from publications worldwide awarded The Times three gold medals, four silver medals and 56 awards of excellence in photography, graphics and design.

The paper also received a judge's special recognition from the 21-member panel for its photo portfolio of October's Southern California wildfires. The package also won one of the gold medals.

A two-page photo spread for a series called "Mortal Wounds" about urban violence also received top accolades.

Other winning entries included breaking news and features packages on the California recall election, the war in Iraq and the Academy Awards, as well as a collection of illustrations for The Times' Book Review covers.

While you're waiting for the rest of the results from the SND contest, here are some interesting comments that floating judge Daryl Moen, author and University of Missouri professor, made on an e-mail list today:

Whew. Just returned from Syracuse where, with 20 other judges, we zipped through 13,600 entries in three days. As the floater judge, I was able to see nearly all the categories. The floater is the one who fills in when one of the judges has a conflict of interest, which is often, as I found out.

One observation worth passing along is that in a year of BIG news--war in Iraq, Afghanistan, shuttle crash and Saddam's capture--not many of those news pages won. The reason, I suspect, is that everyone who enters does that kind of news well, but they all like alike. The judges had trouble finding newspapers that took the next step in news presentation.

They've announced the World's Best Designed Newspapers over at SND. It's R�cord, a sports daily in Mexico City; Puls Biznesu, Warsaw; Upsala Nya Tidning, Uppsala, Sweden; The Herald, Glasgow, Scotland; and The Independent, London. R�cord and The Independent are repeat winners from last year. Congrats to all!

Quick thoughts: No American newspapers, again. Average circulation of these five is a mere 85,200. If you take The Independent out of the mix, it's only 51,500.

I finally saw my first actual copy of R�cord a few weeks ago. A very impressive, 40-ish page tab with every page in color. I've been a fan for several years of Marca, a Madrid sports daily which I understand is R�cord's sister paper. �Felicitaciones!

>SND 25th Edition World's Best Newspapers [SND]

They're looking for questions over at the "sensationally resourceful SND International Web Desk." So I sent one.

In what form do the judges traditionally prefer their, um, "compensation?" ("Bribe" is such an ugly word, I'm sure you'll agree) Russian caviar FedExed on dry ice? Drink vouchers at the Syracuse Holiday Inn? Or do we get the best "results" by going old school with small, unmarked bills? I tried to get the El Mundo guys to tell me what worked for them last year, but they just mumbled something about "Absinthe" and "churros" and what sounded suspiciously like "Good luck laying your hand on some of that, Yanqui swine."

First, it's important to note that drink coupons for the Holiday Inn do no good, since it's at best a long, thoroughly nippy (can we say that on a family site?) walk from the actual judges' hotel, the Sheraton. And we're confident no one here could find his or her way back and forth, especially after redeeming said drink coupons.

Second, the SNDIWD has learned that confidential sources deep in the Reagan Administration (we found two still alive) believe "Yanqui Swine" would be a very good band name, or at least album title. That important fact, combined with the painful absence of after-hours karaoke for Drumlins-weary competition types, means the mood is subdued and you must be more resourceful than ever to get the right "signal-to-noise ratio" (which means, per Webster's, "lawsuit bait") for proper influence.

Therefore, our team of experts advises that you immediately open your e-mail client software, select at least one of the thousands of intriguing yet unsolicited messages with subject lines that read like an ABBA tablature, and click through to order the judges an impressive array of "No Prescription Required" bodily-function-enhancing medications. Trust the SNDIWD. They'll love it! And you'll get the added joy of a little bonus action we like to call "identity theft."

For what it's worth, the SNDIWD prefers simply to bribe the judges to buy the SNDIWD drinks.

"There are so many [tearsheets] that it's hard for an entry to attract attention. It's almost like subtlety winds up being penalized."

Good to hear! Best in Show to The New York Post this year!

>25th Edition Judging Live Updates [SND]