The Pilot's most valuable real estate

The Virginian-Pilot’s effort to make the newspaper essential to readers’ lives begins on Page 1. No other page in the newspaper carries as heavy a burden or receives as much scrutiny.

Decisions that shape the face of The Pilot are framed by two objectives: providing readers with information essential to their lives and capturing the sense of place that is Hampton Roads. Words, images, colors, typefaces, headlines, blocks of type and the use of white space serve these aspirations.

Every front page evolves from a ritual of morning, afternoon and evening meetings during which the day’s events are judged in the context of their significance to our 186,000 subscribers .

Generally, the front page presents four stories , one with a four- or six-column headline to denote its significance in relation to other news on the page.

On rare occasions, like Friday’s gold medal win by a Portsmouth track star, Page 1 focuses on a single news event and presents brief summaries of other stories to “tease” readers to inside pages. In recent days, images of Olympic winners have occupied the prime six-column space at the top of the page where they either underscored Page 1 story or “teased” readers to the paper’s Sports section.

The Pilot’s design is nationally recognized for its quality and daring. Yet some of the embellishments occasionally beg the question: Is the Pilot too driven by design?

The prominence of visuals, along with the emphasis on local news, contrasts with the product readers found on their doorsteps years ago. Gone is the global reach that characterized The Pilot’s front page on Aug. 24, 1963, when nine stories featuring datelines from Washington, D.C., Saigon and Moscow were crammed into an unattractive sea of grays and blacks.

For Editor Denis Finley, design is the act that “pulls all the content together and conveys the intensity of the news.” Putting together a newspaper is like creating a great meal, he explains.

“Every ingredient has to be presented in an interesting way.” Readers are “invited” to indulge in our content. Reporting remains paramount but, Finley adds, “I hate to tell you that the words of our journalists are not enough.”

The national and international focus that once dominated Page 1 is equally outdated, according to Managing Editor Maria Carrillo. “Local news is our franchise.” While information about fighting in Afghanistan or a plane crash in Spain is accessible from a multitude of electronic sources, Carrillo notes, “There’s only one place readers can turn to learn of the proposal to close the Jordan Bridge.”

To hear deputy managing editor Deborah Withey speak of her work as a designer is captivating. A wish to give readers “a window into their world ” drives her philosophy. She wants to engage readers in the newspaper and is conscious of their need for a reprieve from the drumbeat of bad news. The page, she explains, “should not be formulaic in any way. To be engaging, everything should be a complete surprise every day.”

She speaks, too, of our “time-starved readers” who want to know in a flash what happened and what it means. That’s part of the “utility” she seeks to bring to the newspaper.

In her thinking, every element is a story — even a photograph without a caption or those dozen-word summaries designed to lead readers to inside pages .

“They are information, they offer choices, so they count as stories,” she explains.

Yet, with shrinking advertising dollars resulting in a vastly smaller news hole, some design judgments strike me as ill-advised. While I’d never trade today’s front page for the 45-year-old model, sometimes the balance of the page seems weighted in favor of design at the expense of content.

As a newspaper traditionalist, I think column inches should be hoarded like gold ingots. By that measure I wonder whether we really had to give Michael Phelps so much space at the top of Page 1 so many times last week.

Or, by what metric were those 236 beds splashed across the business front last month? The ones meant to illustrate a story about DePaul Hospital’s proposed downsizing? The beds outnumbered the words — including the headline, subhead and text — in the accompanying story. Did 236 beds say more than 191 words?

Our front page on Memorial Day was similarly troubling. That rubbing of a tombstone on the grave of a soldier killed in Vietnam was certainly exquisite and evocative. But using it to fill every inch of Page 1, the most valuable real estate in a newspaper, strikes me as a less-than-ideal use of a treasured resource. Rather than inform, it stirred emotions — a surge of patriotism, perhaps, or a sense of sorrow for war’s awful waste.

Without insinuating any disrespect for a holiday that honors those who died in war and its significance in a military community, this particular Memorial Day lacked the larger significance that surrounded, for example, the fifth anniversary of 9/11, when The Pilot ran a similarly stark front page.

That kind of drama and austerity demands a singular occasion. Anything less diminishes its power.

Nonetheless, that so many readers praised the page suggests that Finley could be right. Maybe words are not enough. But without striking a consistent balance between content and design, we risk undermining our core mission.

Joyce Hoffmann, the public editor, is an associate professor in the English Department at Old Dominion University. Reach her at (757) 446-2475 or public.editor@pilotonline.com.