March 2012 CyberSelection: Today's Front Pages

If I time it right, I can hop on the stationary bicycle at my fitness center, plug in earphones, and watch and listen as the Sky News team reads the headlines of morning UK newspapers and comments on the major stories. If I'm really lucky--and if I bicycle long enough--I can then switch the station to TVE and watch and listen as a Spanish news team does the same for papers from Spain and other parts of Europe. And if I'm not so lucky on the timing? I can go straight to my desktop computer when I get home and navigate to www.newseum.org/todaysfrontpages/ for the Newseum's selection of Today's Front Pages.

The Newseum (www.newseum.org) is a real 250,000 square foot sticks and bricks edifice in Washington, DC. The Freedom Forum, a nonpartisan foundation begun in 1991 by Al Neuharth, who also founded USA Today, is the major funder of the Newseum, but many families and companies contributed as founding partners (www.newseum.org/about/overview/founding-partners/index.html). Today's Front Pages is one of several interactive exhibits at the Newseum; each day a special gallery lets visitors have an expansive look at up to 80 newspaper front pages from every U.S. state, the District of Columbia, and countries around the world.

Today's Front Pages on the Newseum website goes even further. More than 800 newspapers submit their front pages electronically each morning, and by 8:30 AM Eastern time--a half hour before the physical Newseum opens--the pages are available for web browsing.

Gallery and Other Views

The default view on the web is the Gallery view, which shows thumbnails of papers apparently in order by state, then publishing city. You can click on the link below the thumbnail to get a larger--almost full screen--view of the complete front page of that paper. A more interesting way to view the papers, I think, is the Map view (www.newseum.org/todaysfrontpages/flash/default.asp), which presents a U.S. map with dots showing location of newspapers. Roll your mouse over the dots and the front pages flash instantly in a larger-than-thumbnail but still too-small-to-read version to the right. Click on a dot, though, and the front page appears fullscreen in a separate window. It's fun to use the map, which you can navigate and reposition, to mouse over several states and see the various headlines. You can usually read the headlines of the top two or three stories, and if you use your browser's Zoom feature, you might be able to see more. You can also click tabs to go to maps for North America, Asia, the Caribbean, Europe, the Middle East, Oceania, South America, and Africa.

There is a third option for viewing the papers, List view (www.newseum.org/todaysfrontpages/main.asp). Papers appear by default in one continued numbered list with a slider bar, U.S. papers first, divided by state, then other countries alphabetically--Afghanistan, Andorra, and Argentina follow Wyoming. You can also sort papers by region, using a dropdown menu with the same regional options seen on Map view. Regardless of the size of your list, it is even easier here than on Map view to roll your mouse over individual list items and see the front pages pop up on the right. When you click on a paper to open it here, it opens in the same window, which means that if you have enlarged the zoom on the list view, you can get a really large view of the selected paper. Now it is possible to read not just the headlines, but all the text.

Front Page Layout

On Tuesday, January 3--caucus day--I rolled my mouse over the front pages of all papers from Iowa. Not surprisingly, top headlines all targeted the caucuses and the role that Iowa was to play in the U.S. presidential election later that day. The amount of space devoted to politics varied among the papers--there was, after all, Bowl coverage to highlight. In four of the eight papers, though, the word DECISION screamed out from the election headline; some focused on the candidates, their views, and the race, but the Des Moines Register took it upon itself to try to explain the caucus system.

What and how much can you actually read on the Newseum's web front pages? The good news is that, given the site design and the flexibility of your computer and browser(s), the typeface is large enough so that you can easily read every word that appears on the front page. You will need to scroll down, but you probably will not need to scroll horizontally. Alternatively, you may download a "readable PDF" version.

Following the Story

But the PDF, as well as the site, only shows the front page. The trend with front page newspaper design is, and has been for decades, to print the beginning of many stories to grab readers' attention, then to "jump" the rest of the story to an inside page. It's easy enough to "jump" with the printed paper, but impossible on Today's Front Pages. Since the website shows a faithful reproduction of the newspaper front page, there are no hyperlinks embedded in the "See KEYWORD, p.X" or "Please turn to p.X" notes sprinkled throughout, nor on the page numbers in the handy index to inside contents that many papers put at the bottom or along a side of their front page.

Today's Front Pages has done one valuable thing to make it easier to follow a story inside the paper. A link to the paper's website appears on every enlarged front page view. Clicking that gets you to the source of the information, but once there you run up against two problems. First, for many newspapers there is little conformity between the web edition and the print edition. Page and section numbers printed on the front page are of no help when using the website search box to find a story. Sometimes a paper is not actually continuing a story inside, but using the front page to promote, in a few words, a feature inside. In such cases, keywords may or may not be useful. Second, there are time differences. By the time you read the front page and go to the website, the site has probably been updated and perhaps the story you are seeking has been knocked off the site, rewritten, or moved behind a pay gate. I was able to follow a Chicago Tribune blurb for its own investigations spurring changes (jumped to Chicagoland, p.7) on the website, but I wasn't so lucky when following a story about defense cuts in the Dallas Morning News that said to "See Panetta, Page 2A." Shouldn't newspaper companies have their print and online staffs work together to facilitate use of both media? If I were a newspaper editor that contributed PDFs to the Newseum, I would make sure that a staff member sat down at www.newseum.org/todaysfrontpages/ from time to time so see how long it took to follow up on the stories so prominently teased on the front page of my paper--and to come up with a solution.

Your Papers and My Papers

Still, the ability to quickly scan even the front page headlines from a large group of papers can be mindstretching. Each day different Newseum editors pick a Top Ten list (www.newseum.org/todaysfrontpages/topten.asp) that may focus on headlines, photos, innovative design, or something else unusual.

I wanted to create my own Top Ten list of papers to check daily, but I looked in vain for a way to do that on the Newseum site. You have to use your browser's bookmarking feature to store the URL for each of your selected papers. That works fine, though the Newseum app, available free for the iPad, makes collecting up to ten favorites even simpler. Reading the papers on the iPad, with its easy text stretcher, is a joy. I made a collection of papers from most of the places that I have lived throughout my life, to serve as a sort of barometer by which I could measure  change and familiarity. Now I lie leisurely in bed each morning and leaf through newspapers from Ohio, New England, Indiana, Denmark, and Spain, and catch up on the latest news.

Except it isn't the latest news for me, due to time zones. It's noontime in Europe before the papers go up on Today's Front Pages in Washington, so when I read in my morning, I'm reading yesterday's front pages. I wish the Newseum could get the papers up by morning in local time, and I also wish that they could archive all the front pages. For contractual and probably financial reasons, they can't (though there is a limited archive of front pages for some important dates, www.newseum.org/todaysfrontpages/archive.asp). But this is a free resource, with the cooperation of more than 800 news companies. It's still worth scanning, even if I'm reading electronic fishwrap editions.

Susanne Bjørner provides editorial services to publishers, librarians, authors, and researchers from a base in Spain. Contact her at bjorner@earthlink.net or www.bjorner.info.