Local non-chain weeklies in small towns are only surviving by giving readers real news and features. (Such as the Storm Lake, Iowa paper, Storm Lake Times). Given the price of paper and printing, they cannot afford huge full-page visuals or even many large photographs.
Long ago I started a file titled "Design." It grew out of the way the auto manufacturers pushed style over safety. They shaped buyers' tastes with an annual model change heavily defined by visual trivia such as a different grille pattern or fin structure. Year after year, styling pornography displaced engineering integrity, selling vehicles without crucial, available improvements in life-saving safety, fuel efficiency, and pollution control. When art ceases to serve a function, art degrades the latter and debases itself.
Unless that is, art is presented in places plainly reserved to be for "art for art's sake."
As artistic displays are allowed to intrude newspapers, with few boundaries, editors are even shrinking the size of the print itself so as often not to be adequately visible. Moreover, using some background colors means some print is unreadable and invites the artists to a tutorial by an optometrist.
More and more the print size and its lightness are sacrificed to graphic layouts which leave readers squinting or leaving.
Can anyone get a NYT graphic arts director to have a conversation on this topic?
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