The Editorial Page is no longer sacred. This became clear a few years back when design winds started sweeping through the nation’s edit pages.
The design teams as well as marketers argued that the edit page is too serious and too forbidding. Design should be used to make it livelier and more readable. The editors refused to bow down. The edit page was beyond the pale of design.
However, it was not long before the Edit Page lost its solidity and forbidding looks as one newspaper after another capitulated. Colour photographs, graphs, even cutouts started creeping in. Gradually, they became the norm.
Today, the edit page underwent one more dramatic design change. The editorial or the leader which is the newspaper’s stand on key national and international issues was segmented.
The change was introduced by the country’s largest English language newspaper – The Times of India.
The editorial was no longer one single block of text. It was peppered by sideheads – four in the case of the first edit titled India’s Casteaways and three in the case of the second edit titled Delhi Darlings no more.
What was even more interesting from the design point of view was the use of the vertical bar, also called the pipe. This is a design flourish that was popularised by the net.
The fact that the Times of India’s edit team made the change in the most sacred space – the editorial – reflects Internet’s influence on print publications getting deeper and deeper.
On the web, bloggers have used sideheads to drawn attention to sub-points in the blog. They have also used them as a strategy to break eye movement and keep web readers on the page, not to mention as a search engine optimisation tool, though a minor one.
It is not that print publications have not used sideheads in the past. The have been used to break the monotony of grey text and to introduce a new point. They were particularly popular on city pages where they were used as headlines in reports that strung together several small stories such as city briefs, crime briefs or engagements.
Read: Why do newspapers and bloggers use crossheads and sideheads?
But who would have thought that sideheads would appear in an editorial?
They may have stressed points that the newspaper wanted to highlight. But they failed as design innovation. There was not enough text for them to stand out.
Also for the purists, they broke the unity of thought.
One does not know if the newspaper will continue with the innovation in keeping with its edit page maxim of Everything changes, Nothing Changes.
We will have to wait and see.
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