(An interview with Roger Black)

This week, Edmonton’s SeeMagazine did a great interview of Roger Black, and the headline couldn’t be more provocative for publishers, editors or anyone involved in the newspaper industry: Can good design save newspapers?

The interview does begin with the subject of design but quickly takes off to a broader, deeper and more interesting thread of issues that disect –in a masterful way– the essence of disruption and profound the changes newspapers going through.

In Black’s own “outside-of-the-business” view, “Change is happening, but it’s much more complicated than ‘Craigslist is stealing our advertising!’.” He goes on to expose that some of the forces or drifts that are quivering the old business model are the proliferation of channels (the media I no longer mass) and the collapse of the mass-media system as a subset of advertising.

But there is a future, according to Black. And that future carries the basic form of “the page” as the funnel transition of publishing into the digital future. FLYP, the online, Flash magazine is a great example of one innovative direction that publishing will take; the richness of the narratives developed by FLYP’s New York editorial and design teams set a new standard for story telling.

“There is a future,” Black says, “if newspapers let technology strategies to catch-up with them.” At least, we all hope it is so.