When my kids get ready to make art, they reach for the newspaper. Cheap and always available, it’s our household’s all-purpose work surface for messy creativity. And when the kids are done, their creations proudly drying on the kitchen counter, the paint-spattered, goop-glopped newspaper pages spread out to protect the table are often striking to look at in their own right…
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| — | Carlo Rotella |
The Times of Oman got a gold medal from The Society for News Design for their newspaper blackout:
“It’s so different, and handmade, you have to decode it, you have to appreciate the craftsmanship. The page IS the illustration. It breaks almost every rule of conventional presentation, and it can, because that’s how strong the concept is. They took a lot of chances and everything works. I would love to think that I would have had this idea, and then I could just picture myself selling it to my own editor. Clearly this visual team has the confidence of those paying to put the paper out, and that in itself is an accomplishment. I’ve never seen a concept pushed so far, with so little to work with. It’s not flashy — the concept is so pure, it’s genius.”
It’s like nothing we’ve ever seen! —AK
[Newspapers] are the single most efficient way to immerse yourself in the past. If you want to know about 1908, don’t go to some secondary source - read the newspapers. Any old edition will have some revelation which doesn’t hold with our received notions of the time.
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| — | Nicholson Baker |
The staff at Las Vegas Weekly made blackout poems out of their own magazine and they’re encouraging readers to send in their own. Too cool. This one’s by staff writer Kristen Peterson.
People don’t actually read newspapers. They step into them every morning like a hot bath.
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| — | Marshall McLuhan |
To read the daily newspaper in its entirety is to encounter the method in all its purity.
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| — | Marshall McLuhan on the cut-up method of Gysin and Burroughs, 1964 |
