USA TODAY - Sept. 30

September 30, 2014

The top story on the front, above the fold is highly relevant. The Supreme Court not deciding on gay marriage is kind of a big deal. The infographic/map was nice art, but it really overshadows the one photo of a couple being married, which adds more of the human element and is more interesting to readers. Also, all of the copy on this particular front page doesn’t draw readers in or make them want to pick up the paper. People like art and photos, not tons of daunting text to read. The designer should have maybe opted to jump more of the story and make the photo of the couple larger.

            The top story on page 3 uses “allegedly” in the headline which we were told, in class, was unnecessary. In the “What’s Happening Online” sidebar, I deleted “, ever” from the teaser “Airfare Expert: The two days you should never, ever fly” for redundancy. I also deleted an exclamation point from a teaser in this section, because newspapers rarely use exclamation points and it is consistent with all of the other teasers to have no end punctuation.

            Putting the “State-by-State briefs on a color page, seemed like a waste of color. It would have been nice to have color on a page with actual photos instead of just blue clipart and to emphasize the titles. The briefs page doesn’t really lend itself well to color, and as a reader it is more important to me that photos are in color than clipart, even the accompanying color page only has two photos appearing in color.

            Page 6 is very well designed, it has plenty of white space and doesn’t feel as crowded as most of the other pages. The whole paper would be more reader-friendly if all of the page designers took some tips from this one. The lead to the domestic violence in women’s soccer story was cliché. Almost all stories about domestic violence lead off with statistics; seeing a fresh approach would have made readers more likely to finish the story.

            The “Your Say” section on page 7 is a really good way to get more opinions of the public than just the couple of people interviewed for a story. It is presented well, and seems to get a lot of positive feedback from readers. In the Obama/Ebola story there was a widow at the top of one of the columns. Widows are small problems, but they make the copy difficult to read and they look like a design flaw, it would be nice if USA TODAY was more adamant about eliminating them, but it really is a design choice. That same story has a caption under the photo of Obama that falls in the middle of two columns of body copy and creates awkward white space. It would much more readable to have the caption span the length of the bottom of the photo rather than dissect the copy. Overall, it would have been preferential to readers to have more photos in this entire edition. It was very copy-heavy and daunting to pick up.