Challenges Art Departments Around the World Face and How They Overcome Them

By Carrie Whitaker
Bowling Green State University

In this session, speaker Jeff Goertzen of the St. Petersburg Times described some of the problems he found when working with newspapers abroad. There were examples from China, Sweden and Costa Rica, among others. He used distinct examples, explaining how the information was collected for the graphics. It is important he said, to always work collectively.

Some of the problems he identified included:
• Not understanding the culture, making it difficult to cater to the audience
• Abusing graphic space, filling the portion of the page with too much stuff or not enough stuff
• Bad content editing, repeating information in the story and again in the graphic
• Having no respect for graphics, not understanding what they do and the importance of them
• Having no structure in the art department, which creates a power struggle
• No planning or communication

Some ways of how to improve:
• Define the product
• Get commitment from management, sometimes there is a trade-off, I'll give you this, if you you give me the freedom to do this
• Set goals and objectives
• Conduct evaluations
• Give incentives, make your art department want to work
• Have fun! Get involved in the story, it will produce better art.