From TED: Can Design Save the Newspaper?

This is a great video of the pre­sen­ta­tion Pol­ish designer Jacek Utko gave at TED this Feb­ru­ary.


I dis­agree with his premise that read­ers are only leav­ing because they don’t want to pay for yesterday’s news and adver­tis­ers are fol­low­ing them. I think the tech­no­log­i­cal shift in pub­lish­ing is far more per­va­sive than the dis­dain for old news. The truth appears to be that peo­ple want infor­ma­tion when and where they want to con­sume it, and paper is a chron­i­cally inef­fi­cient method for sat­is­fy­ing that need.

But this video high­lights a stop­gap to the inevitable end for print, and I think por­tends a far more inter­est­ing future: whether on paper or online, design­ers should be given a big­ger role in the pre­sen­ta­tion of infor­ma­tion across pub­li­ca­tions. This is a great exam­ple of rethink­ing the role of design from scratch.