Chicago Tribune redesign announcement makes me hesitant to truly believe "it's a whole new day"

To much fanfare this week, the Chicago Tribune has announced their redesign/reimagining. I will hold off on an actual look at the redesign until next week when it goes live (but I will say that this prototype didn't make the cut, thank god).

Today, though, I want to give a couple tips on how not to present your content in a way that makes you seem old and out of touch with "the kids." To do so, I will use the Chicago Tribune's redesign announcement, where they proclaim that "it's a whole new day" at the Tribune Towers (a better slogan that the one that currently greets employees as the head to work at the tower every day: "Change is Inevitable").

Tip One: You should have your announcement not exist completely within the context of an embedded web video that won't load on a mobile phone. The kids these days like their phones. I was forwarded the link while I was away from the Internet for a day, but did have access through my phone. But the video wouldn't play--in fact, the page just returned a big blank box where a nice graphic could have gone. So I just stared at a big blank box for an entire day, wondering what it could possibly hold. Speaking of that big blank box...

Tip Two: a 320x240 video is really, really tiny nowadays. On YouTube, their videos run native at 480x360. On Vimeo, I can embed a video many times that size. In HD even. But nope, for the Tribune to make their big announcement--the complete redesign of their flagship paper--a postage stamp-sized video was good enough. Look how silly it looks, swimming in that sea of white:

But pay no attention: It's a whole new day at the Tribune. They swear! Sure, they may not have a site that works a damn on a mobile phone, and yeah, they clearly don't totally understand that web videos can be bigger than the 2002 standard size, but hey. It's new! And it's a day! And they have a section called Play! With the exclamation point! Yay!

Holy Balls! Chicago Tribune prototype floated

I'm speechless.

Zell does the love/hate thing yet again

Just when you're convinced that Tribune Corp owner Sam Zell is both (1) nuts and (2) a total douchebag when does things like try to sell Chicago's Tribune Tower, he says something like this:

I think that because newspapers have historically been monopolies, I think they've been insulated from reality.

And then you don't know what to think. Because it's true--the local news monopolies are very much to blame for the situation newspapers now find themselves in.

someone needs to steal his caps lock button

This little nugget is an all-Tribune memo sent out by the new "innovation chief" of the Tribune corp, Lee Abrams. It's a barely intelligible list of fifteen ways newspapers can save themselves. Some of them are decent ideas, but they're delivered with such shockingly tactless douchebaggery that you want to do the opposite just to spite him.

“It’s a strategy, basically, of gradually closing down"

The New York Times has an article about the changes at Tribune Co., that might be most notable for how adeptly the they're able to cover the implosion of the newspaper industry without actually putting themselves in too. It takes a fair amount of gymnastics, but the result is a story about newspapers in a newspaper that never actually acknowledges that that it too is in trouble. What other industry would present information that way? None I can think of.

Anyway, what's going to be cut? How about an order of the usual?

Mr. Zell and Mr. Michaels did not address what content would be cut, but Mr. Zell has said before that he disagrees with the heavy allocation of resources to national and international news. Many newspapers have concluded that when a mouse click can collect news of Washington or Baghdad or Beijing from a multitude of sources, local news is their only real hold on readers.

Yes, you read that right: Bring the old "hyperlocal" dog back onto the track for one last race. I'm sure it's still a good idea, right? Oh wait...

P.S. Sorry for the absence, I've been transitioning from one thing to the next. I expect regularly-scheduled updates to continue from here on out.