Rob Hunter

Once You Go Black, You Never Go Back | Roger Black has had a hand in designing publications from Rolling Stone to Newsweek and The New York Times.

Why should anyone listen to what Roger Black has to say about the future of newspapers and magazines?

Well, for one thing, he has played a key role in designing many of the most influential publications of the ’70s and ’80s: as the art director of Rolling Stone starting in 1976, he translated a countercultural sensibility into a mainstream publication; he spent time at New York, the magazine that set the template for regional city-based lifestyle monthlies across North America; and he art directed The New York Times Magazine and Newsweek too before becoming a very highly paid freelance design consultant in 1987. He was there at the dawn of desktop publishing, having helped conceived Smart, the first national magazine created entirely on computers. Right now, he’s working on redesigning the Washington Post, in both its print and online incarnations.

The man knows how the media functions — but he’s not a publisher, nor is he a reporter. He’s an artist, but a practical sort of artist, unattached to old ideas, whose main concern is perfecting what he calls “the user experience” — giving a publication or a website a look and feel that delivers content to a reader in the best, most dynamic way. He’s in the industry, but not of the industry.

“It helps, I think, to be on the outside,” he says. “I’m not working in the trenches doing a job that was defined some time back and then becoming alarmed that that job was either going away or changing dramatically. It’s a very human mistake, one that we all make, to think that the way things are is the way things are going to be for a long time to come. And then big changes happen and we think those changes will stick! And of course, the whole history of human beings tells us that nothing lasts. Social structures and major political entities are fleeting! Look at the Republican Party — the assumption was that they were in there for good.”

To Black’s way of thinking, if newspapers want to understand what’s happening to their industry, they need to do something that daily papers have never been terribly good at: look beyond the day’s events, beyond their immediate woes, and understand a complicated, hydra-headed process happening in society at large. “Change is happening, but it’s much more complicated than ‘Craigslist is stealing our advertising!’ or ‘The Internet is stealing our readers!”” he says. “I think what’s happening is that society has become more complex and diverse. The mass media was built up around a monolithic, homogenous, upwardly mobile, consumerist, middle-class society — that was their base. But that ‘old white guy’ majority is becoming a minority in a lot of places. And once you tinker with the basis of the mass media, the media is no longer mass.

“And another thing that’s happened is the proliferation of channels, in the broad sense of the word — everyone’s not watching the same shows or reading the same publications anymore, and also advertisers want to focus their messages on people who will actually respond to them. It’s a much more complicated game for them now. The whole mass-media system of the last 30 years, with publishing essentially functioning as a subset of the advertising business, has collapsed.”

But what will replace it? Black isn’t sure blogs and websites, as they’re currently designed, are necessarily the ideal solution — he compares the person hunched over his laptop reading an article online to the chicken at the state fair pecking, pecking, pecking and getting a little kernel of corn as its reward. He’s more excited by projects like Flyp (www.flypmedia.com), a general-interest online magazine some of his colleagues in Mexico have developed that combines the format and “flip-through-ability” of a print magazine with the sticky, hyperlinked, Flash-animated dynamism of the web. (It’s probably not a coincidence that the magazine’s name is the first four letters of “flypaper.”)

Black doesn’t think design alone can save newspapers — just two years ago, after all, he did a major redesign on the Rocky Mountain News, which went out of business a year later. But he does think that there’s something about the inherent design of a newspaper, above and beyond anything he or anyone in his profession bring to it, that will always survive.

“If you look at the long history of architecture,” he says, “there are a number of forms — the portico, the arch, the bay window — that crop up again and again and that people find comforting and useful. And I think the page is one of those forms. It’s the ideal size for what the eye can take in, and it’s much older than printing; the Babylonians, the Egyptians, the Romans all had pages. All this stuff morphs around. There will still be movies, there will still be radio programs, and there will still be pages.”

And maybe that’s the best reason why we should listen to Roger Black: he’s comforting. After all, if a restless forward thinker like him thinks newspapers will survive, maybe the medium isn’t doomed after all.

“People are still going to want news, they’re going to want authority, they want great writing, great pictures, great video. The thing that worries me is whether these businesses can do the change management in the meantime. But if newspapers can just hold on and wait for the technology strategies to catch up with them, I think there’s a future for them.”