History Major Senior Seminar

              Andy Bruner
History major senior seminar
Around the early 1970s, newspapers began incorporating a series of new page
design features collectively known as "modernism" or "high modernism." The unifying
theme of these features was their supposed accessibility to readers. Modem design, print
designers began to believe, presented information in ways that caused newspaper readers
to pay closer attention to a page's content and to make sense of what they saw more
quickly. These means of presentation primarily include greater prominence of visuals vs.
text, the arrangement of story packages as rectangles on the page, a reduction in the
number of stories per page and the first widespread use of color in print. So ubiquitous
did these and other less revolutionary characteristics become in the decades following
1970 that historians refer to these years as a distinct period in newspaper design history:
the modem era. 1
Though scholars debate whether or not the modem era continues to the present or
saw its end sometime in the near past, they have con tructed a widely accepted narrative
of modernism's industry-wide growth. According to this narrative, modem design
diffused from early adopters to the rest of the print media industry over the course of
about three decades, the turning point coming in the early 1980s, when the successful
debut of the then-revolutionary USA Today brought many converts to modernism. A
second school of thought interprets USA Today as the first "postmodern" newspaper
I See Kevin G. Barnhurst and John Nerone, The Form a/News: A History (New York: The Guilford Press,
2001),202; Mario J. Garcia, Contemporary Newspaper Design: A Structural Approach (Englewood Cliffs,
NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1981), ]; Sally 1. Morano, "Newspaper Design," in David W. Sloan and Lisa
Mullikin Parcell, eds., American Journalism: History, Principles, Practices (Jefferson, NC: McFarland &
Company, Inc., Publishers, 2002), 322. Sandra H. Utt and Steve Pasternack say the design changes of the
time amount to "a revolution of sorts," though they identify the start of the period in the 1960s rather than
the 70s; Sandra H. Utt and Steve Pasternack, "Front Pages of U.S. Daily Newspapers," Journalism
Quarterly 61:4 (Winter 1984): 879.