Want some opinions on general design...

We had a guy come in for some training the other day, and he pretty much told us every paper in our small-time chain sucks and needs to be redesigned. I'm pretty new to the chain, and this guy came in my second week or so...I pretty much agreed with him and took A TON of his ideas and quickly did a bunch of new stuff right away.

Anyway, one thing he recommended was shorter stories (as short as 5 or 6 paragraphs sometimes) plus a few breakout boxes and stuff like that. These boxes were more or less supposed to answer the question "why does this matter?" for the readers.

How are your papers doing this? Are breakout boxes a regular thing with every story? More than one per story? Breakouts on game stories, or just features? Or both?

Throw all ideas out there. We've argued endlessly in our own newsroom about it already.

 

Every story? No. Centerpieces and such, yes. Big fan of breakouts, but too many can be overkill.

 

easy on the breakouts, dog. every story should not have one.

 

Shorter stories, yes. Breakouts with every story, no way. I've taken on too many experiments that failed. There's usually very little you could do on a standard five- or four-story page without the page becoming a complete visual train wreck of colliding breakouts. Online, however, is a different matter. CNN.com smartly condenses all their stories into four quick bullet-point sentences at the top of every story. As a reader, I find that very user-friendly.