BEFORE: Cyberpresse.ca

AFTER: LaPresse.ca

When I heard last night about how Cyberpresse.ca was being transformed into LaPresse.ca today, I started planning a post in my head, about how the last great example of the "portal" concept from a decade ago had finally fallen, following in the footsteps of Canada.com and Canoe.ca, who for years forced its papers and other brands to be mere sections of the portal instead of having their own websites with their own domain names.

But ... that doesn't seem to be what has happened here. At least not yet. Instead, they've changed the name and the branding (one that has existed for more than 10 years), but not the concept, and for now anyway all the Gesca newspapers still share the same online brand.

Here's what Le Soleil's website looks like right now:

Le Soleil website: Just another section of La Presse?

If I was a Le Soleil reader, I might feel insulted at the idea that my paper was nothing but a subsidiary of another. Imagine if the Montreal Gazette website was nationalpost.com/montreal, or if the Journal de Québec's was journaldemontreal.com/quebec.

The same thing happens for other Gesca papers like Le Droit and La Tribune.

If Quebecers weren't already convinced about the Montrealization of their media, this kind of shoves it in their faces, doesn't it? (Le Soleil's front page today lists its website as lesoleil.cyberpresse.ca, which makes me wonder: Were they even told of this change?)

(UPDATE: Briefs on the websites of Le Nouvelliste and La Tribune are notable in that their texts are identical. I guess the regional papers really are afterthoughts in the La Presse empire.)

I'm hoping that upgrades to the other papers' websites will quickly follow, so we'll see lapresse.ca for Montreal news, latribune.ca for news from Sherbrooke and lesoleil.ca for news from Quebec City.

That irritant aside, the Montreal paper is going all out in promoting the new look, which also includes redesigns of the paper and the website. There's the TV ad above, and a two-page spread in today's La Presse (PDF) explaining the changes. It's clear from the amount of space devoted to web and mobile how much La Presse is betting on new forms of media.

As you can see, the feel of the paper hasn't changed much apart from the logo (I'm sure some people will miss the oddly squarish-oval La Presse mark of old). The bigger change in print is the redesigned section fronts, which are given a more unified look, differentiated by name and colour. Headlines, columnist logos and other aspects of the layout are essentially unchanged.

Online, there are more changes, with the sections adopting the same names and colours as the paper. Notably, some sections that had been given their own names making them quasi-separate from the rest (Technaute, Mon Toit, Mon Cinéma) have been brought back into the fold and made sections of the main site.

But again, the biggest change is the name, and the most work seems to have gone into rebranding everything from their mobile applications to their Twitter accounts.

Goodbye Cyberpresse. We'll miss you, I guess.

Other coverage:

• Les Affaires
• OpenFile

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Before: Last Friday's Metro, Pages 1 and 3

After: Monday's Metro

Gradients! Photo bylines! Giant numbers! Random unnecessary splashes of yellow! BOXY SERIFS!

Newspapers tend to make big deals of their redesigns, even if few people outside the newspaper care about them. Metro is no different. They teased this one for a whole week, and on Monday unveiled the new design with a giant centre-spread guide to it, as if people needed instructions all of a sudden:

Centre spread guide to the new design

The new look comes with a renewed focus on Metro's original reporting (something that was virtually non-existent when the paper launched in 2001). Considering the reporting staff could fit into a minivan, that means a lot of repeat faces.

The basic design elements that make Metro what it is aren't going to change though. It's still littered with by-the-numbers infoboxes, trying to distill important facts into 20-word factbites. But then, that's the whole point, right?

A day by any other name

When I first saw the tease at one of those orange stands last Monday, I was intrigued. Not so much because they were coming out with a new design, but that they said it would be in five days. My amazing addition skills put that on a Saturday, when the paper doesn't publish. Were they going to launch a Saturday edition with the new look?

Sadly, that wasn't to be. There's no money in weekend editions of commuter freesheets.

Instead, Metro seems to have simply decided that Saturday and Sunday no longer qualify as "jours", and that five days after a Monday, one day after Friday, is next Monday.

But maybe I'm just a stickler for these kinds of things.

Stands proudly announce the new-look Metro.

And I couldn't help noticing this minor detail on the sports page:

Oops.

Trente has some brief words from Metro's editor, saying the look is great and will help its journalists and make kittens even cuter and stuff.

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Some other Canadian Page Ones can be found at Newseum's site, which also has a special video on Obama-related newspaper front pages (if you can watch it, the site is very slow).

Among my recommendations for U.S. covers:

• Hometown papers
  • Chicago Tribune
  • Chicago Sun-Times
  • RedEye
• The big ones
  • Washington Post
  • New York Post
  • New York TImes (local edition)
  • Wall Street Journal
• Good design
  • Bakersfield Californian (quoting Obama)
  • Patriot News (quoting MLK and Obama)
  • Hartford Courant (no headline, no text, but the message is clear)
  • Orlando Sentinel (ditto)
  • San Francisco Chronicle (with some strange Photoshopped painting-like image)

The links are now all old, but the covers have been archived here.

Favourite headline, only because nobody else used it: "Tide of hope", from the St. Petersburg Times.

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Sans-serif type, drop shadows, giant cutout clip art overlapping adjacent elements, words over photos, columnist headshots everywhere, and little one-paragraph snippets of text where there were once articles.

The result makes these newspapers look much more like magazines, and conventional wisdom is that the more design-y these pages look, the more interesting they will become to readers.

But these new designs have two problems that you'd think would make them highly unpopular in an age of declining newspaper revenue and tightening budgets.

First, they take up more space, which means either more pages need to be added to the newspaper to fit the same amount of content (this isn't happening - in fact many of these redesigns are done in order to fit a reduced page size), or dramatically cutting the amount of content that goes into the paper. Where a copy editor's instinct is to cram as much information as possible onto the page, the designer's is to waste as much space as possible to make it visually attractive. And it looks like the designers are winning.

Second, these things are complicated, which means design staff have to essentially be laying out all these pages, and in the case of sports they have to keep working late into the night. Where newspapers are shrinking budgets, this increase in staff hours will have to be offset by a drop in the number of copy editors or reporters. It makes me wonder how long these dramatic designs will stay dramatic before we start seeing cookie-cutter default designs used everywhere to save time.

Don't get me wrong, I love good design. I think far too few stories are told using charts, maps or illustrations, in many cases where they are desperately needed. One of my pet peeves is opinion poll stories, which include a couple of paragraphs of opinion from the pollster and then hundreds of words trying (and failing) to translate a table of numbers into prose. Whenever I can, I try to convert those back into tables, which are easier to read and easier to analyze.

But I look at newspapers like Metro, which has coloured boxes with numbers all over the place, tied to articles that have only a handful of sentences to them. I wonder, looking at this: At what point does substance throw in the white towel against the towering forces of style?

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Sun Sentinel travel front by ex-Gazette design director Nuri Ducassi

The South Florida Sun Sentinel, which has been getting noticed for a "bold" change to its page design (and the journalists it is cutting along the way), launched its redesign on Sunday. The Visual Editors blog has images, including the Travel section front above, designed by Nuri Ducassi, who recently left her job as design director for the Montreal Gazette for sunnier Florida pastures.

The redesign looks way cool, but seems to rely way too heavily on turning every bloody story into an infographic of some sort. Eventually, they'll be putting more effort into the look of the story than the writing of it.

I don't know if that's a good thing.

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My newspaper employs an entire department of people whose sole function is to make it look nice. Mainly, they focus their efforts on the front page of the paper, meticulously adjusting every headline, deck, skybox, label, photo and other element to make it most appealing to people passing by with a dollar to spare for the guy running the news stand. But they also design important internal pages, and usually have a hand in cover pages for feature sections.

Sports doesn't usually get that kind of treatment because of how last-minute it is. Aside from the web pointers above the banner, the rest of the page is designed by the editor in charge, and usually consist of a large photo, a main story, a smaller story or column along the side and a feature with a small photo at the bottom.

But on Sunday, with one major story dominating the sports news, I had a problem in the section's design. The photo I wanted to use, of tennis player Rafael Nadal collapsed on his back in exhaustion and celebration of having just won his first Wimbledon title and unseating five-time champion Roger Federer, was horizontal (mainly because Nadal was horizontal at the time), and the layout was vertical (since the paper is a broadsheet and it was the only story going on the page).

So I turned to the design desk for help, gave the design editor on duty a headline and she went to work. The page shown above is what came back, and is much better than anything I could have come up with on my own. The photo turned out very grainy (due to the fact that there was almost no light at Wimbledon when the game finally ended), but the message got across loud and clear.

And that's what good design is all about.

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It put its flag down the side. That's about it.

Calling it a "bold, new design", the new Post keeps the same headline fonts, same body text font, same flag design (though rotated 90 degrees) and the same elements.

Of course, why should they fix something that isn't broken? The National Post "earned 38 international design awards from the Society of Newspaper Design (sic), approximately twice the number of any other English-language Canadian newspaper." -- Translation: We beat the Globe and Star, but lost to La Presse.

The only other noticeable design changes are a slight increase in font size, a very noticeable (I might even say excessive) increase in leading (Torontoist has comparison pictures), and a few other so-hard-to-see-that-I-can't-see-them changes.

The "redesign" also comes with editorial changes, most of which are vaguely described:

• A new section on Mondays dealing with small businesses. (Kind of shocking that they don't have this already.)
• More "Investing" and "Marketing" coverage in the Financial Post.
• Three new columnists: American atheist and Wall Street Journal columnist Christopher Hitchens, Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum, and This American Life's ex-Montrealer Jonathan Goldstein. (It's unclear which of these will write original columns and which are syndicated, but you can take an educated guess.)
• Page Two of each section will be devoted to printing stuff they blogged about the day before. You can see an example in the Arts & Life section with posts from Ampersand.

As part of its Big Launch, the Post even managed to get one of Canada's TV news networks to do a two-minute package glorifying it. Go ahead, guess which one. If you answered "the one they own", you're right.

The Post is seeking comments on its blog. Perhaps I can use the comment feature to get them to stop making crappy videos of talking reporter heads awkwardly reading the articles they just wrote that morning.

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