second brain:

The venerable Washington Post recently resdesigned its website for the 21st century. It looks pretty good; well organised and reasonably clear if a little busy. The headlines are sans serif, as you'd expect in this sleek, fluid medium. And what have they done with the all-important masthead (essentially, the logo)?

This is the new one. Up until the redesign, they were using a contemporary, serif-less font for this as well (in fact I think they were using the dot com address as the masthead). So in order to move their brand into the future, they've gone back 100 years. This isn't as crazy as it seems.

Let's look at a couple of UK newspaper brands, as manifested in advertising. Here's The Guardian:

When it was launched, a couple of years ago in a pre-crash world, it looked right: contemporary, colourful, creative. But to my eyes, this style looks dangerously flippant and throwaway in these gloomier, more insecure times. Also - note the logo. It's just another website address. That's reflected in the actual Guardian masthead, which is designed to look like an internet brand: lower case only, the two words running together. Looks cool. But what are they giving up when they do this?

Here's The Times (other executions here):

The Times is right up against it. If News Corp are about to introduce some kind of payment-model for it, then their brand advertising needs to work harder than ever. Leaving aside the question of whether it will do so in vain; I think these ads do about as good as job as they can do in the circumstances.

What they focus on is reasserting the brand's authority. Each ad is rooted in The Times' expertise: its special correspondents, its grasp of the facts, its depth of knowledge. They've also kept faith with a more traditional masthead/logo, and put it front and centre in the ads.

The internet has been a great leveller and democratiser. Our information sources have been infinitely expanded. News comes from everywhere and anywhere, including our social networks. This is a terrific and exciting thing. But our euphoria at this transformation is curdling. We're starting to realise that, like most terrific things, it carries a cost. Blogs skim and snatch at events; opinions flow as easily as tapwater; rumours spread like smallpox. It's ever harder to know who and what to trust, where to find serious analysis rather than cheap chatter, and how to do so quickly and easily. Here's where newspaper brands - precisely because they've been around forever - should find their competitive advantage. But some of them are so busy trying to look like the rest of the internet that they've forgotten how to be themselves.

The Washington Post and The Times are realising that in the world of new media, one of a newspaper brand's greatest strengths is being old. It's hip to be square.