If you’re still searching for a present for that difficult-to-buy-for person, why not invest in an Irish Times premium digital subscription? Not because it has always been worth it (it has) but because the epaper that comes as part of that package now includes an archive of all editions of the newspaper dating back to its foundation, in 1859.
This is a small but very significant improvement. There has been a newspaper archive on irishtimes.com for decades, but its interface could make it difficult to use. The new facility allows you to read the newspaper as it was originally laid out and published. There is no better way to immerse yourself in the past, whether it’s Emergency-era Dublin or the Celtic Tiger years.
The most intriguing bits are usually not the big stories on the front page but the snippets of day-to-day life – court reports, concert reviews, letters to the editor, classified ads – that give you a real sense of the texture and concerns of the time. They also remind you what a beautiful thing a newspaper can be.
When it started to become clear that print media was facing an extinction-level event, plenty of naysayers maintained it could never happen because print was so obviously a superior medium. But it was clear to anyone who understood their underlying business model that, although it might take a while, the game was up for newspapers.
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Print has actually proved more resilient than many thought. And an irony of this postimperial phase of its history is that the design and appearance of newspapers are of a higher quality than ever. The past three decades saw the introduction of full-colour printing and design software that liberated publishers from the restrictive grids and text-heavy columns that old-fashioned typesetting processes demanded. Papers such as El País, in Spain, took full advantage, with striking page designs and illustrations, and daring use of white space. The design quality of even the most humdrum pages rose in parallel.
If you’re reading this article in the printed Ticket (named magazine of the year at the 2024 Irish Journalism Awards), take a moment to notice the different typographical styles that have been deployed to make your reading experience more pleasurable. The clean sans-serif typeface of the feature headlines. The elegant serif of the body text. The subtle weighting that distinguishes between opinion and features. The striking juxtaposition of images and the clever interplay between picture and headline. (Note to subeditors: don’t let me down here.)
If you are reading online, note the minimal variation in the size and shape of photographs, the uniform fonts across every article (and, let’s be honest, across pretty much every news site in the world). Where are the variety, the subtlety, the sense of a unique identity?
There was a moment, somewhere between the launch of Facebook and the worldwide adoption of the smartphone, when it seemed possible that the design of digital journalism could aspire to the visual sophistication of its dead-tree equivalent, and maybe even go much further. A lot of money and effort were expended. Prototypes were built of pages with sophisticated integration of audio, video, images and text.
It soon became apparent, though, that it would be prohibitively expensive to produce these at scale and that the shift to mobile devices required heavily simplified design solutions that adapted automatically to a range of screen sizes and aspect ratios. Search-engine optimisation and A/B testing trumped elegant wordplay when it came to writing headlines.
In digital media, user experience, or UX, is the primary focus. How long will the page take to load? Will the reader click on a related article? Is there a chance they might subscribe? How much information can we glean about them? These are complicated (and sometimes unsettling) questions, and the visual design often ends up as a secondary concern, a “skin” over the intricate underlying architecture.
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It doesn’t have to be this way forever. The reason so many news websites currently look so boringly similar is not because of a lack of imagination. It’s because they must operate in a marketplace whose rules have been set by two powerful gatekeepers, Google and Meta, which respectively dominate – or monopolise – the worlds of search and social media.
Whether through AI disruption, antitrust legislation or some unforeseeable black-swan event, that hegemony will end, perhaps soon. And if news media is to survive, it will have to reduce its dependence on search and social media.
Which brings us back to where we started. If you value good journalism and good design, give someone you love a newspaper subscription this Christmas.
