Design Trends in U.S. Front Pages, 1885–1985

Abstract

The conventional wisdom suggests that technology and competition have revolutionized newspaper front pages in the past 20 years. This study took the long view, analyzing the visual form of three newspapers over a century. We found that front pages had in fact changed in much the way that the conventional wisdom predicted. But we also found that the change was gradual, that is, that the ideas behind the “design revolution” had been influencing front pages for over half a century. The direction of change was toward making the front page a more efficient map of the news for readers, implying that the sources of change were in design theory and news ideology rather than in economics or technology. The upshot of these changes has been greater uniformity among front pages.