serial consign

If I haven't already made it clear, I am fascinated by newspapers. This interest extends beyond the discussions about the evolving business model of the industry and crowdsourced reporting that I often write about. What is so captivating about newspapers is that, as artifacts, they represent the crystallization of global flows of information. Every edition of a newspaper is a time capsule comprised of hundreds of stories stitched together into a composite narrative. There is something uncanny about the way that stories from around the world are distributed across the columns, pages, and sections of paper space. Marshall McLuhan quipped that if you removed the dateline from a paper it would read as an "exotic and fascinating surrealist poem."

[nancy chunn / new york times front page / april 22, 1996]

In 1996 the American artist Nancy Chunn conducted an extremely thorough exploration of the aesthetic possibilities of the front page. For the entire year she used the front page of the New York Times as a diary, annotating the news of the each day with her own commentary and graphics. Each of Chunn's interventions superimposed illustrated iconography on top of the text while responding to the columnar layout of the page. In an interview with Gary Indiana she described her interest with the Times as follows:

The thing I love about the Times is the variety of stuff that appears on the front page. In some funny way, if you read the paper from cover to cover, it’s a daily map of the world; the front page is a map of what’s important that day -- or what was important the day before, actually. And that’s saying a lot. It’s not only economics, it’s not only politics, it’s not only sports. You get the world, you get the nation, you get the local, you get the extraterrestrial.

It is interesting to view these works chronologically as Chunn developed her own personal rhythm, colour coding and graphic standards based off the news trends that year. The entire Front Pages project was archived in a beautiful text (designed by Lisa Feldman) that was honoured by the AIGA as one of top book designs of 1997.

[los angeles times front page for june 6th 1968 & analytic diagram]

I discovered Chunn's project about halfway through my own mapping of the history of the front page of the Los Angeles Times. Despite the fact my work was of an altogether different tone, I found Chunn's rigor and sense of humour inspiring. I've been working on developing a much more involved system of time-based media mapping for deployment in 2008.

[austin kleon / texas blackout suite part 2 (detail)]

Instead of notation, Austin Kleon's Texas Blackout Suite builds commentary through obscuring content. This project saw Kleon, the self-described "writer who draws," arm himself with a Sharpie marker and reveal latent poetry tucked away in the body text of headline news.

Earlier this year, Martin John Callanan launched a project called I Wanted to See All the News from Today which mines feeds from hundreds of newspapers from around the world and sets up an impressive array of front pages. There are moments within this work when a few adjacent papers feature some of the same content illustrating the permutational quality of how stories are explored in different nodes across a network of texts. This project explores the same territory as the Newseum's Today's Front Pages gateway but (in my opinion) towards much more interesting ends.

If the above links and projects have not satiated your appetite for news aesthetics take a look at Aleksandra Mir's playful illustration project Newsroom 1986-2000 and my post on visualizing the news from earlier this year.