WRITER'S BLOCK 

  EXPERIMENT  II  

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PROPOSAL

The second experiment continues to explore the idea of stories and images. My experience as a staff photographer at the Daily has increased my interest in photojournalism. I also want to write more creative pieces, rather than narrative or analytical assignments. In an attempt to capture both this interest and creative drive, I will design the front page of newspaper, set in an alternate Ann Arbor universe. Inspired by Stranger Things in the sense that the Ann Arbor in the images will look much like the Ann Arbor we see everyday, however the headlines, the stories, and people will not come from our universe. The stories themselves use humor to introduce tough, touchy topics that I see as problems on our campus, such as sexual harassments and Dreamers. Research required for this experiment includes newspaper formatting and rhetoric. The Daily has taught me journalism has a of conventions I had not previously recognized; for example, Associated Press photo captions have a specific format to follow. Other research includes which tool (i.e. Photoshop or InDesign) work best for formatting the front page.  

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GENRE ANALYSIS

Newspapers represent a broad, everchanging category. This experiment looks at the modern American newspaper conventions to prepare a cover page template. Typical newspaper layouts include several subcategories, each with their own complexes and conventions. In this experiment, I look at the effects of headlines and cover stories on the viewer’s interpretation and understanding of the newspaper. First, looking at headlines, Keeble states “headlines in these forms may perform an informative role, as they present the basic information on the content of a story – headlines include the most significant details on the actors, authors or type of an event (1994). The headline must put forth the most information in the simplest form so the reader understand the main themes the stories aim to communicate.

 

Following the first headline, the cover story, or “lead” dominates most of the newspaper first page. Tereszkiewicz puts forth in her analysis of newspaper conventions that the lead story “highlights what is the most relevant, immediate, new, or attractive - which is a core function of a lead as well” (2012). She, in essence, asserts the cover story projects the very core of a newspaper’s mission: to announce the important events occuring at a certain period of time. Further genre analysis by Bonyadi looks specifically at body and ending paragraphs of newspaper stories. Her paper analyzes the effectiveness of newspaper communication in application to teaching. While this experiment refrains from using the newspaper as a educative medium, her analysis of communication serves as good quantification of newspaper effectiveness, specifically what constituents effective rhetoric used in clear communication. In summary, her paper breaks sentences into types such as directive, statements, values etc. While this experiment does not delve into rhetoric used in cover stories themselves, knowledge of these conventions may be useful in the future.

 

Regarding the photographs and captions included in the newspaper, I refer to personal knowledge and experience formatting captions in the Associated Press (AP) format used in the Michigan Daily. Captions should be as brief as possible, while still communicating essential information such as subject name, date, location, and details regarding any activity in the photo(Kille 2009). The location of these elements within the caption itself is also important in newspaper conventions.

 

Lastly, the wide variety of newspaper front covers I selected as models for this experiment, showcase an interesting trendline in both headlines, byline, and cover stories. Newspapers have changed drastically since the invention of the internet the subsequent introduction of smartphones and applications as most consumers get their immediate news from onlines sources. Therefore, newspaper currently present more detailed stories in the paper form, rather than large headlines and news abstracts. The models I selected, which range over sixty years of American history, further show how the size of the headline has shrunk as time progresses. For example, Kennedy’s assassination in The Dallas Morning News dominates the top half of the page, whereas the 9/11 attacks in the New York Times takes up less than a fifth of the page. Also interesting to note, the date on the Kennedy paper is the same day of the assassination, alluding to a time when newspaper printed several papers a day. The 9/11 attack stories were published in the Times the next day. Modern newspapers no longer announce information as they once did; instead they present further analysis and detailed coverage of current events.

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With these genre conventions and norms in mind, I set forth to create a fictional newspaper for a fictional Ann Arbor.

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PROJECT MAP

COVER STORY

• Headline: UFO Lands on Palmer Field

  • Byline?

  • Story

    • The story will use satirical humor to communicate messages related to ending DACA and protecting Dreamers at the University of Michigan during the Trump presidency. Specifics include interviews with students for and against the “aliens” visiting Ann Arbor.

  • Photo - UFO photoshopped image from the original photoblog

 

SECONDARY

• Headline: Dogs No Longer Allowed on Campus

  • Byline: Schlissel Says Stop Trying to Pick up Chicks with Your Canines

  • Story

    • The story will feature anecdotes from students. While the story initially starts with a lighthearted tone centered on the joke of using dogs to pick up girls, I want to allude to cases of sexual harassment on campus to help raise awareness. I am hoping the humor will help deliver the message that our campus needs to properly address cases of sexual harassment rather than ignoring them.

  • Photo - stock photo

 

TERTIARY

• Headline: Student Risks GPA, Pushups over Diag M

  • Byline: None

  • Story

    • The story will initially joke about the student performing push ups over the M, including details on the superstitious story regarding stepping on the block M. However, the story also aims to communicate the detrimental effects of severe academic stress we often see at the University. Students place immense pressures on themselves to do well here, a tough institution.

 

ARTS + GUIDE

The arts section in the paper alludes to a guide, which I plan to include in later sections of the newspaper. The Arts Guide also mentions Detroit’s street art scene, and in later stories I want to include art made by aliens to continue the extraterrestrial themes laid in the cover story.

SPORTS

The sports section of a newspaper feels integral to any large brand. Most of the famous headlines in my models revolve around sports particularly big wins for the home team. I, however did not want the cover story to be a sports victory, therefore the image depicted here does not cover a major victory for the team. The story itself will include details and statistics about the player featured in the image, an actual UM basketball player. For a specific model, see SportsMonday as covered by The Daily. Most sports coverage also include additional images in the Sports section. I plan to include another story detailing the coach’s vision for the team, his thoughts on the game, as well as additional pictures of the team.

 

WEATHER

The weather report current sits at the bottom of the page. I noticed some newspapers (The Michigan Daily) include the weather at the top, while others (LA Times) used to include it at the bottom. Most newspapers these days no longer include the weather, however I wanted to include this in my newspaper as I often used to get the daily forecast from the paper. I therefore changed the date of my paper to a more suitable time for weather from papers.

 

INDEX

I noticed many newspapers include some sort of index or guide to stories featured inside the newspapers under particular sections such as sport, arts, economics, etc. However in this draft, I ran out of space in the current layout, therefore I do not currently have an index. In the future, perhaps an index will help better organize the entire paper.

 

 

SAMPLE EXCERPT

Click the image for a PDF verion

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REFLECTION

Making this newspaper has been quite the journey. I initially started the template in Photoshop, which proved to be quite difficult, because Photoshop is not meant to handle this many text layers with such ease -- Adobe built InDesign to better accommodate layouts and text boxes. The alignment of everything as the end, the final layout, definitely felt the most difficult, as I do not extensively understand InDesign.  While I had used InDesign in a previous project, my understanding was limited to the simple manipulations. Once I got the basics down (and googled many, many questions), I had so much fun creating the InDesign template. The fake newspaper revolves around stupid comedy and silly puns, so I included ridiculous names for the reporters’ names and obviously photoshopped the UFO into the front page image.

    To contrast the apparent silliness in the titles themselves, I wanted to include serious thematic elements in the stories. The UFO article serves as medium to convey campus opinions on ending DACA and keeping Dreamers in college, while the canine article works to touch upon sexual harassment on campus. However my sample draft does not include the cover stories themselves. The sketch draft gives greater detail as to the ideas I hope to convey in the newspaper stories. Instead, I hope to communicate these themes in the future, perhaps in the future or on my own as a personal creative project. Looking at the headlines, I struggled to find a seamless way in which to include both the humor and the serious methods, as these pieces (as noted in the Genre Analysis section) are quite brief. The physical restraints of the document dimensions and the other components of the newspaper also restricted the amount of text I could place in the headline.

    Aside from the headlines, the photocaptions were also immensely fun to write. Many of the articles I researched detailed lengthier photocaptions, which I think came from standalone photo essays. The newspaper models, on the other hand, had shorter photocaptions, often one sentence to tell the subject, action, place and time. My experience writing captions for the Daily further corroborated this. I therefore chose to include shorter captions in my newspaper, which also worked well with my limited space options. In the future, I want to find out how to reduce the seemingly automatic margins that appear around the textboxes. The captions right now seem to take up unnecessary space, and I am not sure how to reduce the margins.  

    Looking to the final project, I reflect on the processes of making experiment one and experiment two. Comparing experiment one to experiment two, I enjoyed making the later more. I see more potential in the newspaper than the photobook. The newspaper, as well as my interested in photojournalism is far newer than creating photobooks, as I have consumed photography in its “traditional” or purely “photographic form” since high school. I see greater potential for developing my photography and writing skills in the newspaper.

 

REFERENCES

 

Arsenault, M. (2012, April 20). Nightmare's End. The Boston Globe.

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Bonyadi, A. (2012). Genre Analysis of Media Texts. Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences,66, 86-96. doi:10.1016/j.sbspro.2012.11.250

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Keeble, R. (2001). The Newspapers Handbook. London: Routledge.

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Kennedy Slain on Dallas Street. (1963, November 23). The Dallas Morning News.

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Kille, L. %. (2017, February 16). Associated Press Style Basics. Retrieved from https://journalistsresource.org/tip-sheets/style/ap-style-basics

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Kleinfield, N. R. (2001, September 12). U. S. Attacked. The New York Times.

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LEÓN, J.A. Reading and Writing (1997) 9: 85. https://doi-org.proxy.lib.umich.edu/10.1023/A:1007928221187

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Men Walk on Moon. (1969, July 21). The New York Times.

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Pet Peeve. (2017, April 9). Boston Globe.

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Reardon, P. (1986, January 27). The Bears Bring it Home. The Chicago Tribune.

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Shaugnessy, Dan. “History Repeats.” Boston Globe, 6 Feb. 2012.

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Surman, T., Popper, N., & Baum, G. (2011, May 2). U. S. Kills Bin Laden. L. A. Times.

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Tereszkiewicz, A. (2012). LEAD, HEADLINE, NEWS ABSTRACT? - GENRE CONVENTIONS OF NEWS SECTIONS ON NEWSPAPER WEBSITES. Studia Linguistica Universitatis Iagellonicae Cracoviensis, (129), 211-224. Retrieved from http://proxy.lib.umich.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/docview/1312506507?accountid=14667

T. (2003, April 14). US Moves in Tikirt After Rescue of POWs. The Michigan Daily. Retrieved from https://digital.bentley.umich.edu/midaily

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Prefer PDFs? Me too! Click below for the PDF version.

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