RESEARCH < posted November 15, 2001 >

Notes from a Discussion with Lisa Stone (Neiman Journalims Fellow at Harvard) on 11.8.01
(The journalists perspective)

Lots of people are going to be doing work related to the media’s coverage of September 11th. What will make mine stand out as different?

Important sources to factor in to my writing, especially in relation to convergence : Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent, Ben Bagdikian’s The Media Monopoly, also, look at the Columbia Journalism Review (one of the most respected critical journals for the field of journalism).

Possiblity: Do a time-based assessment (i.e. hour 1, hour 5, day 2, day 5).
I argued for considering the most interesting examples I can get my hands on in order to talk about intriguing issues in a less programatic way. Still an important, unresolved question.

Possibility: Talk about how, as a designer, visual news interfaces are developed. What’s the design process? (From the perspective of a producer.) Alternate option, to deconstruct interfaces as a viewer/consumer (decoding images/agency and the critical, questioning viewer).

Things to look at: unifying themes, production values, “appropriatness” of design decisions (How does the target audience affect production values?)

What does it mean when news is turned into editorial “art?” For the audience? For the producers? How does that affect ensuing coverage? Is this manufacturing news?

Consider trying to do some qualitative interviews with designers of news content, focusing on their process. Some interesting questions might include:
What are they told to do?
Do they try to create emotionally evocative graphics?
How do they choose colors?
What are the limitations they have to work within (are they limited to certain type faces, etc.)?
Who selects the images they use?
Who writes the copy/headlines?
What can they change?
What did earlier versions look like?
Where do they get their inspiration?
How do they choose the imagery they use for things like background graphics?

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Conclusions:
She asked an extremely important question when she asked what would make my thesis stand out from the crowd of people looking critically at the media¹s coverage of 9/11. My hope is that what I’m doing will bring together two critical dialogues, that of design and that of media studies, which I think few (if any) people are doing.

I also think her suggestion to interview designers who worked on news graphics from 9/11 is a great idea although I’m not sure how/if I could really get access to those people.

It also made me think that it would be interesting to try to interview Steven Heller since he’s one of the few people writing important design criticism that deals with some of the same issues I’m looking into.