Final Edition from Matthew Roberts on Vimeo.

This is a video from the Rocky Mountain News website - a sure sign that times are changing. Two things struck me while I watched this featurette. The first thing is of course, the negative impact that the closing of this newspaper will have not only on the employees and their families, but on the community as a whole. They covered in this video that two competing papers will always make for solid journalism and better coverage for the whole area, simply because competing journalists work harder to get that same story and with that you get two different perspectives on the same issue. While I could concentrate on this angle, I won’t. This, I’m sure, will be an area that is covered by voices more capable across the internet.

The second thing that struck me, was how this kind of a situation affects the design industry. When I was first enrolled in college at WVU back in 2001, my interests at the time were finding out what kind of jobs I could get if I followed the path that I was on. In my mind, a degree in graphic design only led to a limited set of entry level jobs (I was wrong of course, as many nineteen year olds are). In fact, after some of the seniors that I became friends with had graduated, I anticipated what jobs the more ambitious of the bunch would land. The best job offered was an entry-level page layout job for a newspaper in Las Vegas. I was not impressed. To a nineteen year old, the coolest thing about that job was the fact that it’s located in Las Vegas. Thinking back, I realize how important that type of a job is. I didn’t know anything about proper layouts and how grids organize all of the written information that we interact with on a daily basis.

Looking at websites these days, it’s hard to miss the many emulate the content structure and layout of newspapers. From a design stand point, up until seven years ago the web was striving to be like newspapers and other printed media. But since 2002, the web has been rapidly evolving into an entity that can not only emulate (keyword there) newspapers, but due to the nature of the internet, the content is much more dynamic and interactive than print.

While I was watching that video, I was looking at the layout and format of that paper. It seems to have had a spunky, modern vibe going for it. It was a paper that understood the readability of modern-looking grid design, as well as how to leverage a dynamic medium like the internet. It was almost 150 years old, yet it had managed to change and evolve over time. This is a newspaper that took design inspiration from the web, and set a standard in print.

So I guess I’m left with this thought really, how is it that this newspaper (or any newspaper for that matter) fail when it’s not only a defining printed media, but it’s also helping to shape web design? It’s like the competing journalists in Denver. Without the competition, the side that’s left loses the fire to compete and may become lax in it’s responsibilities.

While that would be a very appropriate analogy to end this article with, unfortunately, it won’t work. The web draws it’s inspiration from all printed media, including magazines, posters, catalogs, etc - so somehow in less than a decade, one of the web’s sources of inspiration is becoming less relevant. Is it the web designers that are killing newspapers? No. We love the competition. 15 years ago, many of us would have been (or were) working for a newspaper. It’s a damn shame.

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