It turned out to be one of the more popular things I’ve written. Over time I’ve heard from theaters around the world experimenting with the ideas explored in that post.

Here’s part of an email I got last month:

Hi Chris,

I hope you’re still at this address.

I read your blog post from ‘09 about discovering theatre models that are sustainable and actually move towards viability. We’ve started a theatre in Abuja (Nigeria’s capital) and are looking at innovative approaches to the business of theatre. We ran into some debt and are coming out of the woods. Now, we’re reinventing and also considering a government loan out of a fund that’s recently become available but we want to be as informed and tooled up as we should be. Also, case studies of successful models used elsewhere will be useful for us and encouraging to the banks, as you can imagine.

I wonder what other new and useful insights you’ve had over the years from discussing this — I guess what I’m asking is what models have worked for your friends, which we may stylise for our terrain and replicate?

Neat, right? The wonders of the Internet!

Totally neat. But also, truth be told, a little scary.

Is this thing on?

When real live companies with real live people and real live money are trying things based on something I wrote, I darn well want to feel comfortable that I’m not leading anyone off a cliff.

So, in that spirit,

An Addendum

Or maybe,

A Retrospective?

Anyway,

A Few More Thoughts On Designing A Company

Designing companies is hard.

As my own has grown, we’ve had to pick which new products we’ll tackle, how we hire new people, and how, exactly, we keep the office adequately caffeinated.

But it’s not just those things that go into designing a company. We design our company every single day. The creation of Figure 53 is a continuous act.

The little stuff adds up.

The little stuff is hard to copy.

People study successful companies. They look for what they can replicate.

Replication is hard. Actually, replication is impossible. Replication is copying. Copying doesn’t work.

When people copy the design of our software, I never worry about it. Someone who copies a design doesn’t know the next move. They didn’t get to that place because they figured out how to get there, they got to that place by a shortcut. But the shortcut cuts out all the important stuff.

Are you saying it’s impossible to learn from others?

No.

What I am finally circling around to say is this: I am proud of my original post, but if there is anything I would change, it would be to stress how inconclusive and exploratory those ideas really were, and are.

In retrospect, that post captures the initial moment of product design. A vision for a thing that Might Be, if only we can suss it out with a lot of hard work and corrections to our path.

It represents the point of departure for a unique creative act. The details have not been filled in. All the critical little stuff — the stuff that makes it or breaks it — has not been discovered.

It does not touch on many, many other pieces of the puzzle that will affect the design and implementation of the ideas in play.

And it definitely does not present the only valid option.

Fine, but can it work? Has it worked?

What’s “it”? The problem here is that there is no concrete “it”. There are dozens of possible implementations of those ideas. Some of them might work great. Many of them will fail.

(If you know any great examples of theaters that put memberships at the core of their being, please let me know in the comments, I’d love to learn about them.)

Design Patterns

Design patterns, in software, are architectural strategies that appear across many programs. They represent constructive techniques that appear frequently when dealing with particular kinds of problems.

Design patterns are a good place to start thinking about the high level form of a program. They also serve as a great communication tool; they’re coder shorthand.

But by definition, design patterns don’t dictate specifics, and they don’t determine whether a program will succeed or fail. They can help organize it, they can help clarify it, but they can’t, ultimately, make it good or bad. That’s up to the programmers, whose craft is to create unique software under unique circumstances.

It may be that my ideas from that 2009 post sketch out one design pattern for theater companies. I hope they do. I think they might.

But even if they do, they won’t dictate success. At best they can help organize and clarify. The devil is in the details, and the details are up to you.

First, the context

A few days ago, Brian Sierakowski published an exit interview with Baltimore entrepreneur Paul Capestany. Paul (who, alas, I don’t personally know) is a smart fellow who recently decided to leave Baltimore to pursue his entrepreneurial dreams in San Francisco.

I’m grateful to both Paul and Brian for taking the time to do that interview. I think all of us in Baltimore periodically struggle with the question of why we’re here. It’s nothing but healthy for the growing Baltimore tech community to understand why some people feel the world beyond offers greener pastures.

This morning, as part of the conversation, my friend Mike Subelsky published his own take on the question: “Should we all move to Silicon Valley?”

Now, why I’m adding my two cents

After I read Mike’s post, I checked out the comments down at the bottom.

Down there in the comments, a person by the name of “bhalliburton” shared the following thoughts:

1) There is a difference between a small business start-up and a scalable start-up. (Stephen Blank terminology)

A scalable start-up has to target markets > $500m in size because it intends to become a >$100m revenue company in a few years time.

You can start a small business start-up (a business that feeds your family by serving a known customer with a known product) anywhere – it probably pays to start it in a geography where your customers are.

A scalable start-up needs to be in a place that maximizes your access to highly specialized talent and a place that makes you appealing in an acquisition.

I think the ecosystem for scalable start-ups in SF is simply extraordinary [...]

I don’t actually disagree with the core point of this comment. I think it’s framed in a rather patronizing way, but I don’t disagree that this specific kind of “scalable” start-up is probably going to have some kind of advantage in San Francisco.

Meanwhile, the context in which this advice is framed, patronizing as it is, is not unusual. I’m learning to ignore this attitude, because we clearly share different motivations, and that’s okay.

But.

After some solid arguments on the advantages of San Francisco for “scalable” start-ups, we arrive at the conclusion, which is simply this:

SF is the best place to start a tech company.

And on this point, I’m motivated to reply. ‘Cause that just ain’t true.

“If you want to be an actor, ya gotta be in Hollywood!”

Mike shared with me an early draft of his post, and it included this quote, which he had heard from another Baltimorean who chose to move west to Silicon Valley.

This quote, to me, pretty well summarizes the attitude that “the best place to start a tech company” is in San Francisco.

This quote also, as it turns out, epitomizes everything I’m trying to avoid in my artistic and entrepreneurial life.

The implication of that quote is there is only one kind of actor: Hollywood megastars, or people who aspire to be Hollywood megastars. It implicitly dismisses all other actors. They don’t even qualify for the name.

There will be (a few) Hollywood stars, and if you want to spend your life pursuing your 0.0000001% chance of being one, you’re probably ever-so-slightly statistically better off moving to Hollywood.

That’s not invalid, but jeebus, how stifling! Are we seriously idolizing a vision in which all actors live in Hollywood? That’s the path to success?

I think San Francisco is probably the Hollywood of certain kinds of tech companies.

And I think Figure 53 is almost certainly better off in Baltimore.

Moreover, I think it’s irresponsible to argue that one city in all the world is the place you should move to start a tech company.

bhalliburton implies that my vision of a tech company is cute but not worth the time of serious entrepreneurs.

I get really tired of that. 37signals gets really tired of that. Other awesome tech companies who are changing the world and making good money doing it, I would venture to guess, get really tired of that too.

If startup culture means fostering crowds of high-aiming, high-risk tech companies that absorb lots of money but rarely succeed, making Baltimore a hub for startup companies isn’t that interesting to me. The drive to cash out leaves me cold. I don’t know exactly what a Baltimore-specific tech culture could look like, but I’m totally okay if it doesn’t look like that.

I’m also totally okay if that’s the culture that some people love. That’s cool! I think those kinds of companies are important!

But let’s not needlessly count out a diversity of creative activity. There’s a lot of ways to succeed. Let’s celebrate, and pursue, all of them.

Reporting on the quick success of the application, The New York Times tells us:

The company will also announce that it has raised $800,000 in venture capital, the first step in moving along the path from building an app to running a profitable business.

The first step, eh? But what about the… wait, wait, hold up…

So far, Alphonso Labs has made enough money selling apps to run the business, hire six other employees and have some cash left over.

Ah, right. Okay, I think we have some terminology confusion here. Don’t worry, this jargon can be confusing, but we’ll soon set it straight.

See, in the business world “cash left over” is what we call “profit”.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. “But Chris! How can you have profit before you have venture capital?! Venture capital is the first step to a profitable business!”

I know hon, I know. It’s okay. Take a deep breath. The world is not upside down. This is normal.

See, what Alphonso Labs did was (now stay with me here) they made a product people wanted (still with me?) and then they sold it to people. For money!

So, strictly speaking, the first step these gents took toward running a profitable business happened a little bit before someone gave ‘em 800 thou. It had something to do with making a good product, which had something to do with writing and designing and building something people wanted.

Or at least, that’s how the process has worked out for me. My company gets to enjoy this “cash left over” thing, and we didn’t have to go asking anyone for money to do it.

If I ever did need an extra 800,000, I have a feeling I might end up just getting a boring old bank loan. Probably wouldn’t get profiled in the New York Times because of it, but hey, me and my cash left over can live with that.

Edited at 5:54pm EST to add: Hey look, 37signals was annoyed by this too. Except it was Matt who wrote it up, not Jason.

It reminded me of a story.

A few years ago, my alma mater Carleton College rolled out an extensive redesign of their website.

The design was driven not just by the aesthetic taste of talented designers, but also by extensive research.

When you visit the site, something might strike you as odd:

There are no students.

Not on the home page, anyway. Not on the primary “welcome” screen, where they expect everyone to begin.

That’s weird, right? That’s completely different from almost every other school website you’ll visit. If they show photos at all, they are almost always photos of happy, smiling, multi-cultural students, right?

What gives?

Well, Carleton did some careful research, and they discovered:

Prospective students unanimously disliked pictures of people.

Specifically, they found that:

High school students are extremely cynical about people pictures. Typical comments were:

• “Everybody has the same pictures of students studying under a tree.”
• “They look like models.”
• “The people look posed.”
• “This doesn’t tell me anything about the school. It could be anywhere.”

We saw this reaction consistently, whether we were testing first impressions of competing college web sites or testing early versions of our own design concepts. The first thing our prospective students seem to want is a sense of place, and that means campus photos rather than people.

At the time of the redesign, I read a great article about it (which I can’t seem to find online at the moment) describing how they further discovered that students wanted to imagine themselves at Carleton.

You can see in the homepage design they created, everything guides your imagination to placing yourself in the scene. On top of that, they find places to slide in the spirit of the school — a sense of silliness alongside deep curiosity.

So what?

Thinking about this today, I started to wonder:

What if the same forces are at play for theaters?

It seems like every theater on the planet makes websites showcasing actor photos. But do we know that’s what people want to see? Has anyone ever asked them?

What if people would actually rather see the building? What if people really want to imagine themselves in the space? What if they care more about imagining the way the seat feels, than the way the star looks?

What if all those actor photos look the same? (They do!) What if people want to know what’s different about your theater? Could your theater be anywhere? No! Can you tell it from your website? …Probably not, right?

For an art form built so very deeply on a specific place, there sure are a heck of a lot of nearly placeless theater company web sites.

Worth Asking

I don’t claim to know whether the research of a small liberal arts college should be applied to a theater. It would be unwise to assume it does.

But it does seem like an interesting possibility, no? Maybe worth trying to find the answer?

My favorite caption on Carleton’s site might be the bubble that marks the spot where you’d find a “Web team running out of clever caption ideas.” It’s in the library, if you’re curious.

This morning I finally got around to reading last week’s New York Times Sunday Magazine. Turns out the day I was busy building Seymour was the day this article appeared on my doorstep:

And now, the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism is starting a dual-degree master’s program in journalism and computer science. [...] One goal of the Columbia program, according to Bill Grueskin, the dean of academic affairs, is to produce journalists who will “take it several steps beyond — to where they’re creating a lot of their own new tools.” That means learning enough computer science and software engineering to be able to design tools for information gathering, synthesis, analysis and circulation — or enough, at least, to see what technology can do for journalism. Henning Schulzrinne, a computer-science professor at Columbia, says he hopes students will also leave the program with “tools to assist in gathering, processing and presenting news.”

Emphasis mine. Full article here.

Today I improved the layout of SeeMoreB.com when viewed on an iPad. (The photos are larger, and the header is simpler.) I also went ahead and signed Seymour up on Twitter.

Scott requested that I share the code for Seymour. It’s nothing special, but once I have a chance to clean it up and put some kind of open source license on it, I’ll put it on GitHub and let you know.

This summer, in the depths of my obsession, I had a few conversations with Adam Bachman and Jesse Kriss. I posed the observation: “Okay, I really care about this stuff. If I wanted to put some money where my mouth is, could I actually make a constructive contribution?”

After a few cups of coffee, a few paper sketches, and a whole lotta talkin’, one of the fun ideas someone suggested was: Why not just, you know …do it.

Just create a news product. A minimally viable news product, to be sure. Not a proper, full-grown news product. Yet, nonetheless, something with a minimal semblance of reality, built under real life entrepreneurial pressures.

Is that crazy? How might one build a news entity from scratch? What if you had to create the whole thing, from start to finish, in a single weekend?

One couldn’t get too ambitious, certainly. You’d need something extraordinarily simple, with simple demands on your time and money. But it would also need to be, in some sense, real. A thing that someone, somewhere, might actually, you know, dig.

That’s the fun of a minimally viable product, right? It can be useless to almost everyone, and therefore make no money, but if it costs you almost nothing to build, and almost nothing to tend, then, well, if it’s cool to just a tiny number of people, it could be the seed of something bigger and better. Right?

Here’s the Idea

The simplest news site we could think of that might still be worthwhile is something along the lines of Boston.com’s The Big Picture. It’s simple, it’s beautiful, and it’s compelling.

Maybe Baltimoreans would like to see our own city in pictures like that. The daily pictures of our life in this city — maybe that’s a compelling thing. Maybe I’d like to sit with my iPad in the morning and flick through a page of big, beautiful, Baltimore images. Snapshots of my neighbors. Not some ice sculpture contest in Sweden, but the new graffiti by that amazing street artist who works up and down Greenmount Avenue, or the kids that were hula-hooping at HampdenFest, or the view from the stands at the latest Raven’s game.

Okay, so we have an idea.

Here’s the Implementation

In the spirit of building a “real” thing in a weekend, there had to be a comprehensive plan. It wouldn’t do to say “okay, design an ideal site, then hire some photographers, then….” No! Too much time! Too many resources!

Instead, we’ve got to find some pieces that already exist, and figure out what we can do in one weekend that would bring additional value.

Friday Night

Now, the reason I got on a kick this weekend is because Friday night was the night I stumbled across the new WordPress template by Information Architects.

I had already admired iA. They build news sites. They build really good news sites. And they do it based on principles in which I believe. Go ahead and check out their site. You’ll notice right away that it’s clean and easy to read. What you might not notice right away is that it’s been designed with much more care than first meets the eye. Not sure what I mean? Try resizing the window. You’ll find that this site has been designed five full times, to create the perfect layout for whatever screen size or device you might be using to read it. The same page will magically pop into a new layout as you resize your window. It’s really lovely. It’s really carefully done. And it’s really up for sale.

For, at the present time of writing, a measly 55 buckaroos.

Gentlepersons, we have ignition.

Saturday Morning

What’s a source of photography? I could pay someone, but I need something immediately. Well, there are a lot of photos on the web. Flickr has a bunch. They even have a bunch licensed into the Creative Commons — that lovely place where creative impulses go to live instead of die.

Let’s start with Flickr.

Now we’ve got a site template, and we’ve got a source of photography. Are we done? No. Why? Because the long term cost is still high. I could search Flickr every day, laboriously copying and pasting content from each page into my site. But the time it takes to do that would add up, fast, and the whole point of this is to try an experiment that doesn’t suck me dry while I figure out if it’s got any potential. I want good photos, but I don’t want to spend 30 minutes every morning collecting them.

The Tool

My answer to this problem was to make a tool. I spent Saturday building it, and I call it Seymour. Say hi to Seymour!

What does Seymour do? Well, it automates the curation of images for my site.

When you launch it, it looks like this:

And what is it doing? Well, it’s loading up a search page of all Flickr photos uploaded in the last two weeks that include the word “Baltimore” and are licensed under an appropriate Creative Commons license.

That’s the default starting point. Then, I can start browsing. I can do so by clicking around, or by entering more specific (or less specific) search terms.

Maybe I want to create a collection of photos about the ships down in the harbor. I can enter the search terms up top and refine my search. So far this isn’t anything more fancy than a normal web browser, right?

But the helpful bit comes next: I click on a photo I like, and it looks like this:

Down at the bottom, you’ll find that Seymour has automatically pulled out all the information I need. Title, description, and author information so I can give proper credit to the photographer.

I click on that arrow button there, and Seymour files away this information until I’m ready to publish.

I do this a few more times. Click, browse, click, browse, “Ooo, that one’s cool, let’s use that one”, click, filed, click, filed, done.

Then I click the “Post Them!” button, and friendly old Seymour goes out to my WordPress site, talks to it in the language it understands (XMLRPC), and creates a new post with the photos I liked.

And that’s it! Takes a few seconds.

It didn’t take the entirety of Saturday to make, but I did have to figure out a lot of new Cocoa technology I’ve never used before, so it did become the day’s project. It was a lot of fun just learning new stuff.

Sunday Morning

Well, now that I’m this far, I might as well try to make the site look decent, right? It starts out looking just like the Information Architect’s site, because it IS their site. I don’t want or need to change it much, but it should have its own look.

I’m not a professional web designer, but I can poke around in a site without bringing it to utter ruin, and I did my best to customize this one. Well, the best I could do in a day.

And thus was born

SeeMoreB.com

A place to see large, lovely photos from in and around Baltimore.

Fun! (Well, fun for me at least!)

What happens next

To be honest, I’m not really sure. It’s the sort of thing I could actually keep updating for a few months and see what happens. That was, after all, the whole point of creating Seymour. The tool makes it easy. If nothing ever came of it, I’d be down 55 bucks for the template, 10 bucks for the domain name, and a weekend worth of work. Plus, of course, whatever little amount of time I’d spend actually clicking on photos I liked.

Would there be a reason to do that? I don’t honestly know. I certainly like having the site as a sandbox. If I tried to make it more than a sandbox, would it have a path to something more mature? I think it’s possible. If it did develop some kind of audience, a tasteful ad in the right spot might actually generate a dollar or two. Or maybe it wouldn’t. It’d be an interesting experiment either way.

Anyway, like I said, I honestly don’t know what happens next. If nothing else, or perhaps above all else, I’m open to suggestions.

P.S.: Thanks to luckydave for finding the picture of Seymour.

‘Ye-es,’ returned Eugene, disparagingly, ‘[bees] work; but don’t you think they overdo it? They work so much more than they need—they make so much more than they can eat—they are so incessantly boring and buzzing at their one idea till Death comes upon them—that don’t you think they overdo it? And are human labourers to have no holidays, because of the bees? And am I never to have change of air, because the bees don’t? Mr. Boffin, I think honey excellent at breakfast; but regarded in the light of my conventional schoolmaster and moralist, I protest against the tyrannical humbug of your friend the bee.’

On remuneration:

It appears to this potentate that [...] these things are a question of beefsteaks and porter. You buy the young woman a boat. Very good. You buy her, at the same time a small annuity. You speak of that annuity in pounds sterling, but it is in reality so many pounds of beefsteaks and so many pints of porter. On the one hand, the young woman has the boat. On the other hand, she consumes so many pounds of beefsteaks and so many pints of porter. Those beefsteaks and that porter are the fuel to that young woman’s engine. She derives therefrom a certain amount of power to row the boat; that power will produce so much money; you add that to the small annuity, and thus you get at the young woman’s income. That (it seems to the Contractor) is the way of looking at it.

And finally, on shares:

As is well known to the wise in their generation, traffic in Shares is the one thing to have to do with in this world. Have no antecedents, no established character, no cultivation, no ideas, no manners; have Shares. Have Shares enough to be on Boards of Direction in capital letters, oscillate on mysterious business between London and Paris, and be great. Where does he come from? Shares. Where is he going to? Shares. What are his tastes? Shares. Has he any principles? Shares. What squeezes him into Parliament? Shares. Perhaps he never of himself achieved success in anything, never originated anything, never produced anything! Sufficient to answer all; Shares. O mighty Shares!

(All from Our Mutual Friend, his last completed novel.)

The Story

This morning around 11 AM a man, unhappy about his mother’s spine surgery, shot a doctor.

This incident is still in-progress, about 5 blocks down the road from my house [Edited: Oops, I was confused about where this was happening. Johns Hopkins is at the end of my street, but not their hospital.], and the details may change as the day progresses. But that’s the current story. (The doctor is reported to be expected to pull through.)

Why the Sun in particular is doing a great job, and why this is fascinating in general

In brief:

The Sun’s Crime reporter Justin Fenton appeared very quickly on the scene, providing a trustworthy direct account of what he was seeing.

Justin was able to take several powerful photos of the scene. (That’s down the street from me. [Edited: Nope, it wasn't.] You better believe I am consuming those photos voraciously.)

Justin is sifting through first-hand Tweets from hospital employees on the scene. He is incorporating those accounts into his coverage.

The official account of the @BaltimoreSun is, meanwhile, working through other channels to gather information from the city and police.

The Sun created an impromptu Twitter list of all Twitter accounts they feel are providing helpful coverage of the incident.

Now, here’s where things get especially interesting…

We begin to see multiple official news organizations covering the incident from Twitter. We even see DC-based @TBD publicly request permission to use Justin’s sniper photo, and the Baltimore Sun publicly granting them that permission.

When Justin’s cell phone dies, we see another Sun reporter say she’s bringing him a new one.

We see the official account of the Baltimore Police department releasing updates from their account.

We see a more complete photo gallery appear on the Baltimore Sun website.

We get traces of information from the television outlets, whose reporting is bleeding into Twitter as well.

We continue to get a smattering of first-hand accounts from people on the scene.

We are, in short, watching an unprecedented amalgam of voices, from private citizens to news organizations to official city government, creating an in-the-moment multi-view story, cooperatively and extraordinarily quickly. No single voice must be trusted above all others. Perspectives may be balanced from multiple sources, with varying levels of trust.

What’s more, the voices of the first-hand accounts are fundamentally different from all other forms of reporting. The accounts are not given as an interview to a camera or an on-the-record quote for tomorrow’s front page, they are offered without knowledge of whether the account will actually be “broadcast”. To my reading, the voices of those accounts are more direct, more authentic, and more useful than any printed or recorded interview after the fact.

Hell, even the 140 character limit of Twitter seems (to me) to encourage a plainness and straightforwardness in the accounts that might be lost with a less restrictive medium.

And across it all, I see a tendency toward transparency that I feel I don’t usually see in other reporting formats. That transparency is the basis of trust, or at least the basis for letting me make decisions about where each reported account is coming from.

This isn’t just about the buzzword of “crowdsourcing”, although there is something special about gathering many first-hand accounts in seconds from whereever the news is happening. (I first learned about the recent DC hostage situation from the tweet of a lighting designer who was working across the street.) This is about a fundamentally different story structure, where a professional news organization like the Sun becomes a weighty voice among many voices, serving as a professional reference point, an editorial guide, and a critical source of information in what is nonetheless a collection of disparate voices.

….I see that in the time I’ve taken to write this post, the incident has reached a conclusion. The gunman has killed his mother and committed suicide.

Despite the apparent good news about the doctor (and my personal relief that my wife works at a different hospital), that’s a heavy ending to the story.

Maybe I’ll see this whole series of events with less wonderment in a day or two. But I feel like I just saw a glimmer of something new in the news, and it was remarkable.

I ventured into the drizzle this morning to buy myself a Baltimore Sun.

I wanted to see the new Sun Magazine. It was restored to life today after a fourteen year hibernation.

I will admit to you some measure of excitement as I strode through an unexpectedly chilly rain.

Is that nerdy? Perhaps that’s nerdy.

But my paper and my breakfast were waiting for me at the store, my coffee and my couch were waiting for me at home, and nothing else worth noting pressed for my attention.

I was, therefore, excited (nerdy or no), and you might even say I was in the perfect mental state for consumption: Eager and ready to fall in love with my purchase.

“User Experience” is just a hip phrase for “how’d it go?”

Well, it went okay.

Yeah?

Yeah.

Just “okay”?

Yeah. Just okay.

Why?

I was afraid you’d ask that.

The problem with trying to explain “why” is that the answer is strung up on so many thorny bits of the modern news-reporting apparatus that to do the answer justice would:

1. Take weeks.
2. Send me quickly onto ground where I can only speculate.
3. Make this post unreadably long.

Therefore, in lieu of trying to be complete, I will try to simply follow

The First Thread of my Experience

The first thing that happened, after I picked the paper out of Eddie’s wireframe newstand, was that the slippery advertising section fell out of the middle of the paper and plopped into a heap upon the floor.

Lying there on the floor, it provides us a convenient place to start.

Advertising

First things first: I am not, at the present time, judging advertising. I am not making conclusions about advertising. I am not arguing for or against the necessity of advertising.

What I am doing, at the present time, is cataloguing the size, shape, and general outward appearance of advertising as it is presented in the Baltimore Sun.

Bring Forth the Scale

By weight, the advertising inserts of the Baltimore sun consume 44% of the thing I bought.

Without the inserts, the paper weighs 14 ounces:

The inserts themselves weigh 11:

Of course, the actual percentage-by-weight of all advertising in the Sun is much, much greater than 44%. If I cut every ad out of every page of the “normal” part of the paper, and add that to the inserts, we’d get something a great deal higher.

But I won’t do that, for what I assume are obvious reasons.

The Main Attraction

Let’s move on to my original enticement, the new Sun Magazine.

Below you’ll find a visual representation of the advertising in the magazine. A red block covers each ad, and the pages are arranged in a rough order of “less ads to more ads”.

Out of 44 surfaces available in the magazine, roughly 53% of them are employed to sell products and services.

Naturally, in the real layout, these ads are not sequestered to the end, but are instead mixed about equally throughout.

Moreover, it is important to note that the ads are not marked clearly in red. Many times they are dressed to look like stories.

So What?

Well, this ever-so-cursory analysis tells us a few things. The design of the advertising, as it currently exists in the Baltimore Sun Magazine, leads to the following facts about the reader’s experience:

1. When I open the magazine, it is better than even odds that my eyes are looking at an ad.
2. If my eyes do land on an ad, there is no quick, guaranteed way to know this has happened.

These facts are a very simple, very incomplete, but very incontrovertible part of the user experience of the Baltimore Sun Magazine, as it exists in paper form.

Back to this Morning

I got home, I filled my coffee cup, I pulled out my sausage-egg-and-cheese-on-a-croissant, and I happily sat down to browse the news.

And the first thing that happened? Someone is making a pitch to me. And then I get pitched again. And again. Ah, is this finally a story? Oh, nope, that’s a pitch that looks like a story.

I am, in short, engaged in a gentle yet very real struggle with the product I have purchased, to make it do the damn thing it’s supposed to do: deliver me the news.

This process leaves me ever-so-slightly frustrated, and my very first impression of this new magazine is flavored by the sense that the Baltimore Sun doesn’t much care whether I read their stories or not, as long as I read their ads.

Which, I am saddened to realize, is probably actually true, for someone over there.

The Hard Thing about Details is that There are So Many of Them, and So Many of Them Matter

There’s a saying in software: “Software is nothing but a collection of details.”

It’s hard to talk about the design of a user experience, because, like software, it is nothing but a collection of details. Some of them may even be quite poor without sacrificing the overall experience of the product — and no one gets them all right.

But similarly, some of the details may be done very, very well, and yet a collection of less important details done poorly conspire to render the whole effort moot.

For example, you may write an absolutely superb article about Baltimore, but if you deliver it in a package with just enough little frictions in just enough places, you push the probability further and further toward the chance that a given person will never read your article at all.

The challenge of designing a successful, sustainable product is finding how to lower that friction without destroying the way you eat.

This is not easy. Of course it’s not easy. Generating income is always a force in opposition to the perfectly smooth user experience. This is the trick of it.

The slippery sloshy slurry of product design is a big ol’ mess, and you won’t get it perfect, and it’s hard.

But Principles Can Help

Somewhere in your gut is a guiding principle. The reason you’re making what you’re making. The change you want to see in the world. All of the power and all of the force of your creativity is tied to this principle. This principle is the fountainhead of your energy and the anchor of your resolution.

The burning clarity of a principle can melt away the slurry. Some of it, at least.

Take reporting. I won’t presume to offer a defining principle for a reporter, but I’d be very comfortable in assuming it generally involves a relationship of trust between the reporter and the reader. When the fortunes of the newspapers began to wane, and the managers began to turn the knobs on the dying business model this way and that, searching for the magical combination that would unlock the new prosperity, it should have been clear that trickery was fundamentally incompatible with the presentation of the news. And yet advertisers are given more and more leeway to trample onto the turf of the reporter — in the case of online news, literally trampling, obscuring, or shoving aside the story. And they are permitted the grossest kind of trickery — creating ads that look like reporting — with only the meekest protestation of a tiny “ADVERTISEMENT” printed in the header to show that the original principle is, by someone’s estimation, still followed.

These kind of choices represent a shift in principle, and it’s poisonous. It doesn’t mean that advertising can’t be part of the solution^[1], but it does represent a sign that the redesign of the news is not in touch with the core principles of the news, and that’s both frustrating and scary.

Principles, and Friends

It’s easy enough to talk about these things from the outside, but it can be terribly hard to see them from the inside. I was humbled to be reminded of this only a few days ago, when my entrepreneurial energies sent me speculating down a perfectly reasonable business path. Reasonable, that is, until my teammates pointed out that, for all its merits, it would necessarily become a huge distraction, and thus poison our existing efforts. It was hard to hear, at first, as critical messages often are.

So clarify your principles, but don’t assume you can follow them alone, either.

In the Meantime

I continue my search for a pleasant way to read the stories of my city. The new Sun Magazine, as a rather watered-down style mag with enough advertising incorporated carelessly enough to make it hard to find the stories, is not a draw, and I don’t expect to walk down to Eddie’s for a paper again soon.

I want to read the news. I care about my city. I feel connected to individual reporters at the Sun, hard-working folks like Julie Scharper, Gus Sentementes, and Justin Fenton. I want to read their stories. I just haven’t found a good way to do it yet. There are enough frictions, in enough places, to push me away from the paper and, heaven forfend, the the website. These products fight me when I try to use them. They get in the way of their own mission: for me to read their stories. Not just because of how they integrate advertising, but with their overall design, format, and delivery mechanism.

Of course, maybe it’s just me. Maybe I’m extraordinarily picky. On the other hand, it’s the role of a product designer to develop an extraordinary pickiness. Your raw sensitivity to the tiny pin-pricks of the experience is what guides you to file away the splinters. And the splinters, in aggregate, are the thing that bleed your product of greatness.

[1] I used to think advertising was necessarily a bad thing. I don’t believe that anymore, in part because of some great counterexamples.