serial consign

These diagrams were a study related to my Masters thesis project, Movable Parts: The Retooling of the Los Angeles Times. In developing an understanding of newspaper culture I decided mapping the evolution of the front page would be a beneficial exercise. The below images tracks the front page of the Los Angeles Times over the entire history of the daily.

I selected a front page from every other decade, starting with the very first edition of the paper in 1881. Note the shifting hierarchy of images (yellow), advertising (orange) and editorial content (blue). The small black arrows are links to related content elsewhere within the paper.

Given that these front pages span 130 years of visual culture, it is not surprising that the information space of the Times has changed considerably. Note that advertising content had all but been removed from the front page by 1925. This shift can be attributed to the (then) emerging journalistic principals that called for the separation of church and state (advertising and editorial content). Conversely, the web developed into a venue open to the exploration of integrated advertising and editorial content.

The images below map the front page of latimes.com front page from 1996 through 2006.

The Times web presence over the ten-year study period is marked by several radical reconfigurations. The paper quickly shifts from an "online placeholder" in 1996, to struggling to develop the front page as a portal through 2002, to the recent reduction of amount of information on the initial page and related integration of advertising and editorial content. It should be noted that Google introduced its contextual advertising model in 2003.