As I already mentioned, I really like the book “Designing News” by Francesco Franchi; I highlighted sentences and took notes on almost every single page. Here I want to present the ones that I see as somehow important for my Master’s Thesis:
The reader of publications seeks for the confirmation of his world view. Newspapers / Magazines are worlds of meanings: “…readers usually judge a newspaper by the way it handles news in which they feel personally involved, and in fact do not express any preference other than of seeing their own interpretation of the facts coincide with the newspaper’s.” p17
Newspaper / Journalism is the necessary filter in a world of information overload: “a newspaper mechanism that ensures that I, the reader, can understand a bit more about this world, which is packed with information but increasingly incomprehensible.” p19, quote by Mariotti, and “…a new approach to the newspaper in which it is not longer viewed as a physical product but as a service. (…) A newspaper is a knowledge management technology capable of identifying, organizing, interpreting and distributing quality information.” p39
My magazines function as compilation of articles, as the one who the user puts on his Kindle; in Pocket or Instapaper: “A printed newspaper is like a package. The reader who wants to read only about sports or only about the stock exchange has to buy the same newspaper as the reader who is interested only in politics, in recipes, or in horoscopes. Online, on the other hand, the newspaper is ‘unpacked’ …” p21
Maybe the web itself is only a too overloaded depository for articles: The reader scrolls through them, looking for the most interesting articles, and then moves them in a more relaxed enviroment (Instapaper, Kindle) to read them there. In this sense, I’m only one of the readers; putting my selection in a magazine instead of just in my private Kindle selection: “The majority of the debate about the web focuses perennially on the idea of movement: users’ actions are seen as constant searching, finding, and scrolling rapidly through content.” p28, and “Only by getting rid of everything that is not essential will we finally be able to read in peace. This is precisely the idea behind the birth of the first reading apps…“ p29, and “the power of selection has been taken away from the editors and given to the readers” p45
Information and Communication is not the same: “The journalist and designer must move within a spectrum that includes raw information at one end and communication at the other, staying somewhere in the middle. Consciously choosing this position ensures that they do not fall into the trap of either supplying a plethora of facts and figures or, at the opposite end of the spectrum, editorializing by guiding readers’ opinion and employing an aesthetic that is an end in itself.” p79
Information graphics = “Communication of knowledge through pictures” and “It is the responsibility of the ‘transformer’ to understand the data, to get all necessary information from the expert, to decide what is worth transmitting to the public, how to make it understandable, how to link it with general knowledge or with information already given in other charts. In this sense, the transformer is the trustee of the public.” p172, quote by Neurath
The structure that I like so much is hard to find in the Design practise: “A design problem keeps changing while it is treated…from blurry to sharp and back again, frequently being revised, altered, detailed and modified. (…) Learning what the problem is IS the problem. p212, quote by Rittel