By Alison Berstein,
Bulletin Correspondent
Ed Henninger is no stranger to newspapers.
Henninger, an independent newspaper consultant for more than 25 years, is the director of Henninger Consulting, based in Rock Hill, S.C.
Henninger will speak on “Designing your niche publications” at the New England Newspaper and Press Association’s winter convention at the Boston Marriott Long Wharf hotel Friday, Feb. 24, and Saturday, Feb. 25.
To him, a newspaper and its readers have an important relationship – one that works both ways.
“Design is a two-sided relationship – how the paper approaches the reader, and how the reader approaches the paper,” he said.
Thinking like a news designer requires a balance of being analytical and creative, Henninger said.
“A right-brained person is someone who is more visual, more willing to explore the rules if not bend the rules. They’re more ready to try something new,” he said. “Left-brained people are word people, they’re writers, they’re editors. They know and can state and follow the rules.”
Henninger sees value in having both an understanding of the rules and the courage to stray from that foundation.
“Newspaper design is not about how it looks but how it works,” he said. “I know what the laws are; I know what the rules are of design.”
“What I’ve discovered is that when I’m working on the design of a page, I jump from one lobe to the other. That’s part of the fun of what I do,” he said. “The right brain is saying, ‘That’s really cool,’ the left brain is asking, ‘Does it work?’”
He urges big thinkers to have that flexibility between the intellectual left brain and the innovative right brain.
“Really great designers are people who can do that all the time because they can do something that just really works,” he said. “You ask them, ‘Why did you do that?’ and they’ll say, ‘I don’t know.’
“It fits all the rules, and yet it stretches those rules,” he said. “It’s really fascinating to get into that kind of talking and thinking.”
That fascination is critical to a news career, said Henninger, who differentiates a career from a job.
“You have to like it, don’t you?
“Designing newspapers is a profession, and that’s important to me. We need to think, act and design like a professional,” he said.
Henninger was introduced to news design through working with his college newspaper.
“I didn’t realize that I was falling in love with design at that time. It took me 40 years,” he said. “You have to like it, you have to love it.”
Henninger thinks that training is important to help this passion grow.
“A profession is what you want to get better at doing,” he said. “There are many people for whom news design is a job, and the reason it is is that they haven’t been given the kind of training that becomes a profession for them.”
He thinks that managers should see that their employees receive that pivotal training so that their employees will be capable of accomplishing the tasks expected of them.
“Too many managers ask their people to do design without a lick of training,” he said. “I don’t bear any ill will toward people who are put into that positon, I actually feel bad for them. And they’re doing it to their readers and to their publishers. They don’t see that they’re doing the wrong thing, and I don’t mean that in a negative way.”
Henninger outlined the various resources available to designers.
“Just like any skill, they need to learn,” he said. “There are webinars, there are all kinds of blogs. They could look at newspapers that do design well and emulate them. I didn’t say copy. Emulate.”
That notion – publications emulating, not copying, other publications – is an important one to Henninger, who has worked with publications throughout the country and held workshops in several countries.
Although the principles of design do not change from newspaper to newspaper, each publication should have its own look, he said.
“It would be a mistake … if every newspaper looked like every other newspaper,” he said. “The look of a paper will differ markedly from a paper right up the road. It has to do with locality, and what they’re trying to do for their readers.”
Henninger feels promising about the future of news design because of the advanced design capabilities available.
“We have better type,” he said. “We have better presses so we can push print. We have color on every page in some newspapers. We didn’t have that at first. Plus software’s made it possible to do all kinds of things.”
He also noted that publications are paying more attention to design.
“Even small-town papers are seeing that design matters, and they want to be better designers,” he said. “They’re seeing the papers and learning that they can’t just do things the way they’ve done it. I’m encouraged by that.”
Convention Speaker Henninger
‘Design is a two-sided relationship — how the paper approaches the reader, and how the reader approaches the paper.’
— Ed Henninger, Director
Henninger Consulting, Rock Hill, S.C.
‘Newspaper design is not about how it looks but how it works.’
— Ed Henninger
‘Too many managers ask their people to do design without a lick of training.’
— Ed Henninger
Inaugural Day ‘open letter’ – to the rest of us
Gene Policinski, inside the First Amendment
Gene Policinski is chief operating officer of the Newseum Institute and senior vice president of the Institute’s First Amendment Center. He can be reached at gpolicinski@newseum.org.
Follow him on Twitter:
@genefac
Sending an “open letter” to President Trump has been in vogue these days.
Social activists, business moguls, media chieftains and political leaders all have penned a multitude of them since the November election. Some offer advice, some raise alarms, some offer praise and some just convey insults.
All well and good – those exchanges and more are in the “free speech and free press” ethos protected by the First Amendment of speaking “truth to power” – even if the response from Trump more often than not has been to tar vigorously any unfavorable messages as “untruth.”
So this moment in history is just too ripe not to join in, but with a twist: Here’s my open letter about our core freedoms of speech, press, assembly, petition and religion … as a note not to the new commander in chief, but to the rest of us — “We, The People.”
For those who reveled in Trump’s oath of office, take a moment to consider that the freedoms of speech and press that he seems to be targeting were in no small way vital to a campaign rooted in reaching out to those who felt marginalized, ignored or even betrayed by both major parties.
Trump’s ongoing “fireside tweets” are both new to American politics and an echo of FDR’s similar mastery of the new medium of his era, radio, to speak directly to voters. He and we need to keep in mind that loosening libel laws to make it easier to sue a reporter also will make it easier to mount a legal challenge to all of us – including Trump – over our online comments.
And then there’s Trump’s biting, emotional indictments of the news media. More than 60 news and free press organizations earlier this week sent a multi-page note to the president and Vice President Pence, asking for a meeting to discuss transparency and press access to their administration.
We, the people, should endorse that call to coverage by our independent “watchdogs on government.” In turn, journalists must take action to reverse a widespread view – 74 percent in the latest State of the First Amendment survey – that the news media is failing to live up to its responsibility to be accurate and unbiased in news reports or to, at the least, be transparent in declaring bias.
Holding government accountable in public for how public policy is made, and how public money is spent, would seem to be a nonpartisan objective on which we can all agree. In that same State of the First Amendment survey, 71 percent of us said that was the case.
We will need to keep in mind as a nation that discussion, dissent, disagreement and debate are the hallmarks of a strong and open system of self-governance – and provide the means for self-correction when this nation goes astray. Let’s consider how rare it is in the world to be able to assemble peaceably without fear of government persecution or prosecution, and to petition the government for change.
In like manner, there might be those who decried the “Women’s March” that followed the Inaugural Parade by one day as divisive. But what a grand example to other nations: Hundreds of thousands of Americans on one day, celebrating the peaceful transition of national power after a heated, closely contested election — only to be followed a single day later, in the same space, by hundreds of thousands of Americans protesting the political particulars of that transfer.
And finally, there’s certainly every reason to fear domestic and international terrorists. But we need to remember that targeting others solely because of their Muslim religious faith not only violates our nation’s unique commitment to respecting all faiths, but resurrects images of a time when unjustified wartime fear and disgraceful ethnic bias led us to intern Japanese Americans at the start if World War II.
More than ever, as we enter this new “Era of Trump,” we should heed the call to duty as citizens expressed in the observation by my late colleague John Seigenthaler that our First Amendment freedoms “are never safe, never secure, but always in the process of being made safe and secure.”
We might disagree – and often do – on how those five core freedoms of the First Amendment apply to any given set of facts.
But we should all stand behind them against any attempt to limit, weaken or ignore them on the basis of the variable political winds, the power of fear – or even the impact of the occasional presidential tweet.