This may have been the most exciting session of the day, not because it was particularly compelling or anything, but because The Pendulum was featured in it! Randy Stano, who led the session, talked about the popular trends in college newspaper design and what works in design. He also talked briefly about what didn’t work, but the focus was on the good things that papers were doing.
It was great to know that a page from our newspaper made it into his presentation, that he deemed it good enough to mention, but I didn’t agree at all! It was an inside page, from the Sept. 14th edition, and it had zero art on the page. There were two SGA stories on it (which he dinged us for, because both used “SGA” in the headlines and that’s a no-no), one of which had a more online box, the briefs, a correction box and the calendar. That was it. It’s the kind of page that makes me so unhappy because there wasn’t a single picture. Just a lot of boring text. He praised us for being able to work with so much text and the fact that the page had good horizontal and vertical movement, which were both valid points. I just wish there had been art, or that we had managed to get recognized for a more interesting page! There have been so many other great pages that I wish could have made it in to his presentation, and instead we had a page with no art. Sad face.
He really emphasized that we don’t have to be so serious and that we can take risks with our papers because we are still in college and don’t need to be stuck on being stuck up.
ALSO! He had these great examples of turning things sideways! Which we’re totally going to implement at the paper. It’s something that you can really only do once or twice a year and for something great, but it’s going to happen! Look out for sideways Pendulum pages in the future.
-Kristen Case
ENN Convention Blog 