Masters Theses

Date of Award

12-1999

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science

Major

Communication

Major Professor

Robert Heller

Abstract

The newspaper industry is a veteran in the media battle for consumers' limited attention and dollars. Circulation is a measure of a newspaper's success as a business,and product quality has been shown to influence circulation. One aspect of quality is visual, or design, excellence. Industry contests are one measure of visual excellence.This thesis examined wiimers in three recent annual Society for News Design Contests, focusing on American broadsheet daily front pages, to determine whether the award basis for "best of the best" pages could be described.The researcher found common characteristics in a range of areas, including a marked preference in later pages for traditional black-letter nameplate treatments; an average over the three years studied of four stories per page with three stories"jumping," or being completed on an inside page; index use on more than three quarters of winning pages; and weather forecasts appearing on more than two-thirds of winning pages. Teasers, those brief items that give a front-page presence to selected inside stories, appeared on 84 percent of winning pages, while some type of displaycopy unit, generally used to break up story text, appeared on every page.The researcher also found that half the primary packages, which are built around a page's dominant or lead subject, contained only one story, while nearly a third contained two stories. Primary packages averaged more than 60 percent of a page's overall space.In addition, analysis of space occupied by text, headlines, and images revealed that text and headline space dropped over the three years studied while image space increased.Analyses were supported by a group of 75 figures over more than 130 pages.11 Common characteristics discovered in the analysis served as the basis for a group of 13 guidelines intended to provide news designers with a framework in the daily effort to communicate with consumers and thereby add to their company's success as a business.

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