CHRONICLING THE CHIMURENGA CHRONICLE

The Story of the World Today for the Men and Women of Tomorrow

"The Children’s Newspaper was one of the twentieth century’s most successful magazines for children, running for an astonishing 46 years. During its run of well over 2,000 issues, it covered some of history’s most turbulent times, starting in the aftermath of the Great War, watching over the scientific and social advances of the 1920s and 1930s, following the progress of the Second World War, and seeing Britain emerge from the austerity of the post-war years into the pop-tastic world of the 1960s.

For half its lifetime, The Children’s Newspaper had the hand of Arthur Mee at its tiller, and the paper reflected Mee’s religious faith, his patriotism and his drive to educate the children of the masses. It was only in the 1950s that The Children’s Newspaper began to stray from this brief as the editors and staff tried to reflect the rapidly changing social climate – in which children had their own television programmes, their own fashions and culture – by introducing new features, interviews and comic strips. This mixture of education and entertainment helped the paper survive an onslaught from rival publications and kept the title going until it was eventually absorbed, in 1965, into a new, colourful magazine from the same publisher, Look and Learn...."

read more here
and download full old issues...
___
check how kids are spoken to in this paper - the stories and news reported, and way presented - in our age - publishing-for-children would assume flies over young peoples heads, and that they wont be interested.
___

Predicting e-readers in 1981: A look back at the future

Newspapers in the Year 2000: “Videotex services will become mature businesses…”

(This report written was originally published by APME in 1981.)

The appearance of newspapers at the beginning of the next century may be affected more by technology and economics than by the inspirations of editors and designers. That’s not to say editors and designers won’t play significant roles, they almost certainly will; however, the product itself may be radically altered by forces already being felt.

Through our imperfect eyes into the future, here are some of the developments that can be seen within the next two decades.

Read the rest here

Serial fiction

A journalistic tradition that can be traced back to the days of Dickens, serial fiction has become steadily less prevalent in newspapers during the latter half of the 20th century, arguably due to television, radio, and other electronic media displacing newspapers as a primary source for information and entertainment.

But Serial Fiction remains popular in many newspapers on the continent eg in Tanzania Swahili tabloids such as Uwazi (Transparency), Ijumaa (Friday), Ijumaa Wikienda (Friday Weekender), Risasi (Bullet), Amani (Peace) and Championi (Champion), have one page out of twelve dedicated to serial fiction. Next in Nigeria also recently began to regularly feature fiction on its pages.

One installment of a serial fiction for the Chimurenga Chronicle?

The Birth of Next

Pulitzer-prize winning journalist Dele Olojede is setting up a media business in Nigeria, launching later this year.

If you, or someone you know, would love to work as a journalist in an organisation that will radically shake up the 4th Estate in Nigeria, and be one of the most exciting and rewarding places to work, click here.

Classified

Newspaper as public space
Call for submissions - Bibi

Chicago

by Alaa Al Aswany

Chicago was first published in weekly instalments in the opposition newspaper Al-Dustour. "The main strength of The Yacoubian Building was its political edge. Al Aswany is more daring here: in the last third of the novel, a visit by President Mubarak to the students in Chicago is effectively satirized. (...) Farouk Abdel Wahab's English translation is often awkward. Most of all, the sexual element is so persistent as to seem pathological." - Sameer Rahim, Times Literary Supplement

[fiction in newspapers?]

All City Writers The book, a massive volume of more than 400 pages, has been conceived as an imaginary newspaper. The chronicles it contains have not been penned by real journalists or narrators, but by people who define themselves as ‘writers’. 406 Pages, Format: 24,5 cm x 33,5 cm Hardcover.

read more...

Newspapers as Art: The making of Serkan Ozkaya's "Today Could Be A Day of Historic Importance"

The Making of TODAY COULD BE A DAY OF HISTORICAL IMPORTANCE from baris ozcetin on Vimeo.

Tech Killed the Kenyan Blog (Potash)

In 2006 when I discovered Kenyan blogs, I stopped reading newspapers. I used to skim in fact rather than read newspapers because what Kibaki and Raila do is not news, how it affects me is. And newspapers didn’t tell me that. I cannot blame them, they weren’t addressing me… my demographic. Some blogs did.

As a blogger, a lot of my writing then was very political. Political in the sense of: how a certain kind of Kenyan responds to and copes with the consequences of bad governance. It wasn’t about the shenanigans of the political class but the ways in which some of us responded to them. When the political class made a cameo appearance in my blog it was because I, or one of my peers, had enjoyed their largesse. A largesse that faded into the new harems, bellies, Benzos and numbered accounts of a Kibaki era noveau riche class. In the Moi days, I liked to point out, they shared the love. You could walk into town and take a matatu home with a slice of Goldenberg money.

Read it here

Award-Winning Newspaper Designs (Smashing Magazine)

By: Vitaly Friedman

El Economista (Madrid, Spain)
El Economista uses a very traditional, subtle and unique newspaper layout. Notice how well the typography reflects the weight of single articles. Infographics support the content and headlines are surrounded by huge amount of whitespace.





Äripäev (Tallinn, Estonia)
Äripäev’s signature is the heavy use of typography. The layout may sometimes seem overcrowded, however the packaging is always clean, simple to digest and easy to read. Note the difference in weights of colors: color, grey and red are applied carefully and sparingly.





De Morgen (Belgium)
De Morgen focuses on attractive packaging and a visually appealing layout. Vivid colors offer readers more eye-candy; however, they also have a function as they e.g. clearly separate quotations from the overall article. Headlines are centered, background-colors differ from page to page.





Politiken (Copenhagen, Denmark)
Politiken has a very eye-pleasing, legible layout with soft, neutral colors. Notice the clean horizontal packaging on the right-hand side image below. The sharpness of typography is breathtaking.




The Rzeczpospolita (Warsaw, Poland)
The Rzeczpospolita displays its conservatism in a traditional, conservative layout. No fancy images, no vivid background colors in use. The content dominates and helps the layout to gain a rather traditional look.





Le Monde (Paris, France)
Le Monde presents a mix of colorful infographics, solid typography and professional content…





Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (Frankfurt, Germany)
…so does the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszietung: the excerpts are distributed uniformly which gives the page a clear and easy-to-read and easy-to-scan structure. It’s not always possible, though.





Expresso (Portugal)
Expresso: with rich colors, clean grid-based layout and concise typography. Notice how the colors are applied and how the content is separated (see second screenshot).




The Guardian (London, UK)
The Guardian has recently finished its redesign. Result: more vivid colors and more vivid blocks. However, the legibility and the sharpness of presentation don’t suffer. A nice example of how multiple colors can be used not destroying the balance between visual appeal and legibility.






Dubai Express (Dubai, United Arab Emirates)
Dubai Express is another example of colorful yet legible layout design. The layout has 10 colors on one single page, used in different contexts in different colors. Note the sharpness of typography and use of capital letters on the front page. In this case color is definitely appropriate as the newspaper’s main topic is entertainment.





Mint (India)
Mint, financial daily in India, uses large indentation for typography and elegant visual highlights to separate the content. That works well: both attractive, scannable and easy-to-read.




St. Louis Post-Dispatch (US)
St. Louis Post-Dispatch (US) isn’t a boulevard-newspaper, but a local regional magazine. The layout has a clear content hierarchy and a very simple structure. Huge amount of whitespace: waste of space or a clever technique to focus readers’ attention on the main topics?



Hartford Courant (US)
The Hartford Courant is a standout in the American newspaper market. The newspaper distinguishes itself with an enduring elegance in design and typography. Though conservative in their approach, designers engage readers with the bold use of visuals. The contrast between their quiet, understated style and the gutsy photography and illustrations create a tension that captures the attention of readers.




source

All I Wanted for Christmas Was a Newspaper

Bloggers are no replacement for real journalists.

By PAUL MULSHINE
Newark, N.J.

Star-Ledger staff celebrate winning the Pulitzer Prize in 2005 (AP).

When my colleague at the Newark Star-Ledger John Farmer started off in journalism more than five decades ago, things were very different. After covering a political event, he'd hop on the campaign bus, pull out a typewriter, and start banging out copy. As the bus would pull into a town, he'd ball up a finished page and toss it out the window. There a runner would scoop it up and rush it off to a telegraph station where it would be blasted back to the home office.

At the time, reporters thought this method was high-tech. Now, thanks to the Internet, a writer can file a story instantly from anywhere. It's incredibly convenient, but that same technology is killing old-fashioned newspapers. Some tell us that that's a good thing. I disagree and believe that the public will miss us once we're gone.

Mr. Farmer, who is now the Star-Ledger's editorial page editor, retold his experience of the old days a short while ago at a wake of sorts for departing colleagues. The paper has been losing money and might have had to shut its doors sometime early next year. So the drivers' and mailers' unions made contract concessions, and about 150 nonunion editorial staff took buyouts as part of an effort by the publisher to save the paper.

The Star-Ledger is among the 15 largest newspapers in America, and it circulates in some of the most prosperous suburbs of New York City. We are perhaps alone among the major papers in devoting extensive coverage to small-town news and sports. We routinely get scoops on what the Steinbrenners are thinking about the Yankees. And in 2005, the paper won the Pulitzer Prize for its sober coverage of Democrat Gov. Jim McGreevey's resignation after his admission to an adulterous affair with another man.

The Opinion Journal WidgetDownload Opinion Journal's widget and link to the most important editorials and op-eds of the day from your blog or Web page.
.
The problem is that printing a hard copy of a publication packed with solid, interesting reporting isn't a guarantee of economic success in the age of instant news. Blogger Glenn Reynolds of "Instapundit" fame seems to be pleased at this. In his book, "An Army of Davids," Mr. Reynolds heralds an era in which "[m]illions of Americans who were in awe of the punditocracy now realize that anyone can do this stuff."

No, they can't. Millions of American can't even pronounce "pundit," or spell it for that matter. On the Internet and on the other form of "alternative media," talk radio, a disliked pundit has roughly a 50-50 chance of being derided as a "pundint," if my eyes and ears are any indication.

The type of person who can't even keep track of the number of times the letter "N" appears in a two-syllable word is not the type of person who is going to offer great insight into complex issues. But the democratic urge expressed by Mr. Reynolds is not new. Someone is always heralding the rise of "the intellectual declaration of independence of the American people," as H.L. Mencken once put it.

In his 1920 essay "The National Letters," Mencken traced this sentiment back to the early days of our democracy. He noted how first Ralph Waldo Emerson and then Walt Whitman prophesized the rise of what Whitman termed "a class of native authors, literatuses, far different, far higher in grade than any yet known." Mencken was pessimistic about this prospect thanks to what he termed "the democratic distrust of whatever strikes beneath the prevailing platitudes."

I share that pessimism. Every time a new medium arises, a new group of avatars arises with it, assuring us of the wondrous effects it will produce for our democracy.

I encountered this back in the early 1970s in my communications classes at Rutgers. Cheap, portable video cameras had just been invented, and I was assured by the bearded professors and grad students that these cameras would lead to a rebirth of democracy. The citizenry would start recording public meetings and the result would be a revolution.

Now we're hearing the same thing about the blogosphere. "When enough bloggers take the leap, and start reporting on the statehouse, city council, courts, etc. firsthand, full-time, then the Big Media will take notice and the avalanche will begin," Mr. Reynolds quotes another blogger as saying. If this avalanche ever occurs, a lot of bloggers will be found gasping for breath under piles of pure ennui. There is nothing more tedious than a public meeting.

After I got out of Rutgers, I began as a reporter at a newspaper in Ocean County, N.J. If the Toms River Regional Board of Education had not offered free coffee, I fear that I might have been found the next day curled up on the floor in the back of the room like Rip Van Winkle. As it was, I only made it through the endless stream of resolutions and speeches by employing trance-inducing techniques learned in my youth during religion class at St. Joseph's school up the street.

The common thread here, whether the subject is foreign, national or local, is that the writer in question is performing a valuable task for the reader -- one that no sane man would perform for free. He is assembling what in the business world is termed the "executive summary." Anyone can duplicate a long and tedious report. And anyone can highlight one passage from that report and either praise or denounce it. But it takes both talent and willpower to analyze the report in its entirety and put it in a context comprehensible to the casual reader.

This highlights the real flaw in the thinking of those who herald the era of citizen journalism. They assume newspapers are going out of business because we aren't doing what we in fact do amazingly well, which is to quickly analyze and report on complex public issues. The real reason they're under pressure is much more mundane. The Internet can carry ads more cheaply, particularly help-wanted and automotive ads.

So if you want a car or a job, go to the Internet. But don't expect that Web site to hire somebody to sit through town-council meetings and explain to you why your taxes will be going up. Soon, newspapers won't be able to do it either.

Over the past few weeks, I've watched a parade of top-notch reporters leave the Star-Ledger for the last time. The old model for compensating journalists is as obsolete as the telegraph. If anyone out there in the blogosphere can tell me what the new model is, I will pronounce him the first genius I've ever encountered on the Internet.

Mr. Mulshine is an opinion columnist for the Newark Star-Ledger.


source