Eleven years after API’s Newspaper Design: 2000 and Beyond u2014 the 1988 seminar I’ve already posted documents about elsewhere on this site u2014 the American Press Institute decided to run the exercise again, this time looking two decades out. In the spring of 1999, John G. Finneman, API’s director of operations and administration, wrote to confirm that I’d be part of the 16th annual J. Montgomery Curtis Memorial Seminar in Reston.
This is to finally confirm that you will be participating here in API’s 16″ annual J. Montgomery Curtis Memorial Seminar, which we’re entitling Newspaper Design: 2020, on Oct. 24-26.
The letter is explicit about the lineage, and it’s worth reading alongside the 1988 material in the timeline:
As we’ve discussed, this will be a follow-up to API’s 1988 program, Newspaper Design: 2000 and Beyond.
At the time I was director of technology and information strategies at Phoenix Newspapers, Inc. u2014 a title that says something about how far the conversation had moved from the drafting table since the first seminar. The assignment, though, was the same one: put on the collective creative hat.
During our upcoming fall program, participants once again will be asked to wear their collective creative hats and envision the “newspaper” of 2020 from a design standpoint. How is it most likely going to evolve and what might it look like?
The quotation marks around “newspaper” are Finneman’s, and they do a lot of work.
The Society of News Design was again a partner, with a study organized around three buckets u2014 design, color and infographics; technology and new media; and people. Finneman credits the framing to a conference call I’d had with David Gray:
Warren told me this is what you came up with in your conference call with David Gray.
The signature element of the 1988 program came back as well. Each participant would build a front page of the future, content mix and all, for analysis and a post-seminar book.
These pages, which will once again be featured in our post-seminar book, will be analyzed in advance by Roger Black. As he did in 1988, Roger will be leading a discussion on the body of work.
The seminar was underwritten by API’s J. Montgomery Curtis Fund, which covered tuition, room and meals at the Hyatt Dulles, plus the production of the book. Participants paid their own way there. And, in a detail that dates the letter as surely as anything else in it, I was asked to send along a glossy photo and a biographical sketch.
Looking at this from 2026, the target year has come and gone u2014 and then some. What strikes me is that the 1988 group was asked to imagine 2000 largely as a printed artifact, while the 1999 group was being asked about 2020 with the web already reshaping the question. Whether any of us got it right is a matter for the front pages themselves.