I’ve been thinking more about the Society of News Design after last week’s blow-up within the organization, and the one thought that keeps coming back to me is that the organization still feels like the Society of Newspaper Designers rather than Society of News Design. Yes, for decades, when you said “news design”, that meant print. But that’s no longer the case, and we’ve all seen this future coming for the past decade. If the organization truly wants to “enhance communication around the world through excellence in visual journalism”, as its mission statement says, then there are a few things it needs to do:

• Realize that promoting excellence in visual journalism no longer means helping designers find design jobs and climb to positions of power within the media industry. Designers’ role in the new world order is not as simple as “transitioning from print design to Web design.” The days of division of labor in journalism are drawing to a close. Sure, there will still be a few specialists at each media company, but increasingly, a journalist will no longer be able to trade on only design skills. The way I see it, in the new media company, you either produce content or you create and maintain the framework that houses and distributes the content. The reason the recent wave of cuts at newspapers have been targeted at designers is that they aren’t regular content producers. It’s not a knock on them; it’s just not part of their job description. At the same time, designers also are not the heavy lifters when it comes to building the framework of a new media operation (programmers are). So in many ways, designers will be caught in limbo: They don’t produce original content on a frequent basis and their knowledge is not required on a regular basis in constructing the framework. Going forward, design, for the most part, will cease to be a specific position and instead become one of the skills that a content producer or a framework builder will need to have. In essence, the prototypical journalist is shifting back toward the jack-of-all-trades model, and the SND needs to deal with that.

• What that means is that SND needs to start looking at how to get more design thinking, rather than more designers, into journalism. That can be accomplished in several ways:
  • Provide serious retraining for current newspaper designers. The society would be doing its members a great service to help turn them from designers into content producers, and I’m not just talking about knowing how to make a slideshow or a Flash graphic, which are still more or less design-centric. Teach them how to report, how to write, how to edit copy, how to shoot video — and do it well enough to be able to get a job based on those skills. Also, point them to opportunities where they can build up a portfolio demonstrating those skills. In short, equip them with the qualifications and skills they need to compete for journalism jobs where design will not be the most important aspect of their work. If this can be done, then you are keeping design-oriented minds in the business, and that will permeate their work and the work of their peers. Designers can also go the other route and go more into framework development, but in my experience, what newspaper designers do veer closer to content creation than programming, so it’s probably an easier transition to become a content creator (and probably a bit easier to compete for a job than trying to pit your three workshops’ worth of programming knowledge against people who have studied and worked in that field for years).
  • Stop being a designers-only club. As I’ve written before, a true online newsroom has relatively few obvious, day-to-day design needs. If the SND’s influence remains only primarily within the sphere of designers, then it’s warping toward irrelevance. What it needs to do is to reach out to others in the journalism field, especially people at new online journalism ventures. These people haven’t had traditional journalism dogma — including the perceived peripheral role of design — drilled into them, and their platform is so new that even they don’t know what a successful model should look like. This is the time to push the importance of design in online journalism. Make design an integral part of the primordial DNA of the next incarnation of journalism, and you won’t find yourself again having to claw for greater respect and recognition for design in the coming decades after the model has taken shape.
  • To help achieve the previous point, the SND should make a real effort to reach out to the non-designer crowd by offering design courses geared toward their work. In the Web 2.0 world, it’s increasingly easy to put together a decent-looking site without a lick of design or code knowledge, so skip the basic Web-design and CSS lessons, which can be had for free anywhere anyway. Instead, teach the new online reporters how to visualize the information they’ve gathered. Help them see how a well-designed infographic, map, or chart can convey their information more succinctly. Teach Web programmers (not the same thing as Web designers) about how good design enhances the user experience. The idea here is to help people who are not designers see the connection between design and content or design and framework. A big part of the development of Web publishing has been aimed precisely at separating content from design, so that one doesn’t need design knowledge to produce content in a presentable form. While this works for one-size-fits-all situations, it also creates content producers who lack design skills. If the SND can effectively remarry the two in the minds of those practicing journalism on the Web, then it can tap a whole new segment of journalists for whom it had little relevance before, and in the process spread its influence among people who will be in positions of power in the new journalism model.

• Stop making members have to physically attend conferences and workshops!!! Instead, offer most of your training sessions online, both in real time and asynchronously. A few reasons for this:
  • First, few working stiffs can afford it or find the time to travel to another city for a workshop. But it would be much easier for them to spend a few hours and maybe even pay a small fee for online workshops.
  • Second, having to physically go to a conference/workshop makes the events feel exclusive and only reinforces the idea of the SND being a designers-only club (as in “Oh, those guys are off to their annual design geek meetings”). A non-designer would be much more likely to spend 30 minutes watching an online workshop on something design-related that’s relevant to his/her job than to take a day off from work and book flight and lodging to go to a workshop in some city a few hundred/thousand miles away. Reduce or eliminate that barrier to entry.
  • Not making people have to physically go to conferences also means you don’t have to physically host conferences, which cuts down on your expenses. Use the savings and the wonders of the Internet to produce many more low-cost training sessions. Do weekly chat sessions, podcasts, video tips, live Webcasts, etc. Offer some of the more basic training material for free to the public. This will draw in a bigger audience, expanding your reach. The more basic, free design sessions would also be good gateways for introducing non-designers to SND and helping them see that design has relevance for their work, again helping build the organization’s influence among the non-design segments of journalists. You can still charge or require a membership for the more advanced sessions and materials, especially if you do some workshops in real time where people following online can interact and ask questions.