Chatting with the Editors Weblog, Trivino used the example of London’s NI afternoon free paper to explain how Web interfaces and A1 print pages are “interacting”. When designing thelondonpaper, he was trying to appeal to a younger audience, a Web audience. Since younger generations are very familiar with and read much of their news on the Internet, Trivino recognized the necessity of drawing parallels between the news they read on the screen and that they read in print.

How to do this? Even Trivino doesn’t have the perfect solution at the moment because designs are changing so rapidly. But an increase in images on the front of front-pages is one of his theories.

In the early days of news sites and news aggregators, Trivino points out that they were based mostly on text. But in the last couple of years, more images and video have been sneaking in. He used the examples of The Guardian, USA Today and Aftonbladet as examples of newspaper websites whose “skin is images.”

The expectation by the audience to see more images is contributing to content fragmentation that will eventually affect newspaper’s print versions. Trivino pointed to papers like France’s DirectSoir of the UK’s Independent that sometimes splash an image or an infographic over their entire front page.

But Trivino admits that this won’t be the solution for all papers: a publication’s audience still needs to be taken into consideration. For example, readers of the Wall Street Journal will never expect the text-heavy financial publication to begin adding full-page images, or many images at all for that matter. The design can be changed, as the Journal did with its European and Asian editions, to integrate the print and Web versions more. But a radical departure from a classic design would probably alienate readers.

Alienation is a considerable concern, according to Trivino. Because of this, newspapers are trying first to learn and then speak the digital language. There is an esthetic and technical challenge to newspaper redesigns in the digital age as well as a content challenge. For example, younger audiences will go for the new designs with shorter news articles with more pictures, which was part of the idea behind thelondonpaper. Their reading is hectic on the Web and does not translate well to a 128-page newspaper.  

On the other hand, people still take the time to sit down and read weekend papers, so the content and the design has to keep those traditional readers in mind, including many pages and lots of analysis.

These are just a couple of the design issues that Trivino will be discussing in Cape Town at the 14th World Editors Forum. Stay tuned next week to the Editors Weblog to learn more.