Print newspapers have learned many lessons in the new digital information age. Some print news industry leaders have also come to understand how the “Wisdom of Crowds” and social media networks will be critical to their future. Individuals, groups, and social platforms now facilitate story advancement and exposure. So we must understand how crowds will drive our published stories. But it will be how we design that determines or success in the last published mile to the readers.

The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations, published in 2004 Wikipedia – The Wisdom of Crowds

But to reach a mass audience, we still depend on a mass media channel. Magazine publishers own this niche. The periodic cycle afforded to magazines allows for the organization and graphic presentation of a proven popular or developing story.

Publishers must be more focused on the graphic presentation of the news than creating the news. The news will be created and promoted without you in the future. Have you ever seen the EPIC 2014 and update EPIC 2015 video by Making IT Happen UK? This 1990’s video is a ficticious prediction that provides insight about several corporate and technological events (Googlezon excluded) that have paralled reality.

In the year 2014 the New York times has gone offline. The Fourth Estate’s fortunes have waned …What happened to the news? …and what is EPIC: Launch Video EPIC 2015

Understand as a publisher that your job is to design and present interesting information. Provide visual communication that makes any other news source or medium (including newspapers) pale in comparison to your presentation.

Magazine publishers must learn what newspapers have done right and wrong. Publishers must adapt their digital and web brands to functions as the online newspaper equivalent for their niche even if they focus their main revenue and media deliverable in print format.

We continue to watch and learn. We must adapt more quickly than those publishing mediums that don’t act quickly enough. We must understand both our readers and advertisers needs.

Newspapers are dying for a few reasons. Readers don’t want to pay for yesterday’s news, and advertisers follow them. Your iPhone, your laptop, Is much more handy than New York Times on Sunday. And we should save trees in the end. So it’s enough to bury any industry. So, should we rather ask, “Can anything save newspapers?”

Jacek Utko is an extraordinary Polish newspaper designer whose redesigns for papers in Eastern Europe not only win awards, but increase circulation by up to 100%. Can good design save the newspaper? It just might.

via Jacek Utko designs to save newspapers | Video on TED.com.

We must not be so proud of our content that we decide it’s only available to the elderly, affulient, and elite -EPIC reference. We must be taught the value of web traffic and how long term dividends from SEO can greatly exceed the short term paid content wall.

We must learn that if we are designing truly great graphical information communications, the more people that we can expose to our creative work will always outproduce micro-payments results for individual access or short term subscription.