Lambert here:
We are in the process of revising the Naked Capitalism newsletter in the hopes that we can turn it into a real circulation builder, instead of simply a service to readers. To that end, we want to make it weekly or fortnightly, give it a more professional look, shorten and tighten up the prose, and (we hope) add graphics. We have an example newsletter to follow that we like: The Cradle. It looks like this:
Our problem is the graphics (and not the layout, or the type, or the black, white, and red color scheme). As you can see, for the graphics the Cradle has used a collage technique, layering together a number of photos. If we publish one newsletter a week with five items, that’s twenty collages a month, with proof cycles to match. That’s a big burden. Every two weeks is ten pieces, still big.
We could reduce the burden. One approach would be to create an inventory of generic and topical graphics, as opposed making custom graphics for each story. (The topics we use in Links might be a starting point.) We might also simplify the graphics and perhaps alter their size. So, for example, as opposed to creating, on demand, a large graphic of a Yemeni container port overlaid with a head, flags, and a dagger, we might have a generic image of boats on the Red Sea overlaid with a dagger, also using less vertical space. We could then take generic graphic out of inventory when we had a story under that topic. We woudd create the generic, topical inventory in bulk, and draw it down. This approach would greatly simplify the editorial cycle as well.
However, I have always been on the production side of the house, and so that solution is how I think. If you are an artist, you may have a completely different idea of the right approach (although your idea would also have to meet our deadlines). Another production-oriented solution would be AI, but every AI image I’ve ever seen has been uncanny and ugly. If you really have those prompts mastered, you could change our mind, though!
If you want to put forward a solution for our newsletter problem, please comment (and please put a working email address in your comment so we can get in touch with you; we don’t ever share them, and nobody can see them).
Thank you!
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I really enjoy the topical daily links and hope that continues.
Just a thought, but what about a weekly ‘magazine’ with a wrap up of the previous weeks more important links on the most important current topics, eg these days Ukraine, ME and us politics, each headed with a single graphic? So no or little new writing but maybe 3 graphics? Perhaps a Saturday pub date might appeal to potential younger readers too busy to spend time during the week. Maybe with most pertinent links from Saturdays regular links plus the previous 6 days.
For me, the red, or salmon, color of link headings is a little hard to read, my old eyes would prefer something darker. It is nice that they stand out.
And the problem is in finding the individual images, or in creating collage from them?
Both, though presumably there’s a Creative Common-licensed trove of images.
Using an AI image generator is to use something built upon the theft of billions of images made by artists, photographers and digital graphics people without their permission or compensation. AI image generation could not even exist without this theft. There are a number of lawsuits by artists trying to fight this because it’s already impacting ability of artists to make a living which was and is plenty hard enough without AI.
While I’m not in any of the lawsuits, I did find that 12 of my paintings are in the LAION-5B database, given how much this website stands against the exploitation of workers, I’m shocked that using AI would even be considered for use here.
> While I’m not in any of the lawsuits, I did find that 12 of my paintings are in the LAION-5B database, given how much this website stands against the exploitation of workers, I’m shocked that using AI would even be considered for use here.
I’ve said as much myself, but it’s out there, and I don’t know the field well. Perhaps there are “clean” training sets out there (e.g., from Adobe?)
The Adobe Firefly training set uses licensed Getty Images and Adobe stock images, so it is supposed to be unencumbered from the copyright issue.
Unfortunately, not. All of them have data scraped copyrighted work into their data sets.
How about a local AI trained on Creative Commons images?
Adding, on the LAION-5B database: Those [glass bowls]!
Don’t clutch those pearls too tightly …
What does that even mean?
If you’re asking about the specific styling used in those example collages you can achieve that in the free digital painting software Krita by modifying the layer style to add a ‘drop shadow’ and ‘outer glow’.
Regarding managing large amounts of general graphics to choose from – AI generators still have iffy quality along with the moral concerns – but there are also great AL algos that can separate the foreground and background of images which could save a significant amount of time in preparing the library of images you’d like to use.
I don’t care about the styling. I care about getting reasonable quality in a tight time frame.
I am a little skeptical about the success an amped up version of the Naked Capitalism newsletter might achieve as a circulation builder — with or without excellent graphics added as eye-candy.
I like the graphics Mr. Fish does for Chris Hedges. I also believe there are a lot of old, out of copyright graphics available from past eras similar to our own. I sent an odd combination of old and new as an example of how old and new might be married.
Thinking more positively, I believe there are innumerable artists who want little more than an outlet where their products might be seen and appreciated. Your main problem could become problems of curation and selection of images. Consider the numerous high quality songs and poems that appear regularly now in comments. People want to express themselves and there are so few and ever fewer outlets. Artists and their friends will look for where their art is used, and some of them may become new readers and add to the breadth of the commentariat.
> I like the graphics Mr. Fish does for Chris Hedges. I also believe there are a lot of old, out of copyright graphics available from past eras similar to our own. I sent an odd combination of old and new as an example of how old and new might be married.
These are good suggestions!
> there are innumerable artists who want little more than an outlet where their products might be seen and appreciated. Your main problem could become problems of curation and selection of images.
Hopefully, one or two of them read this post!
Y’all tight with John Helmer. Ask whoever does his cartoons if he/she is interested.
Be careful he doesn’t sue you tho.
Lambert did not mention that we intend to expand our mailing list from “friends and family” as in those who have commented and donated, to include “allies and the like-minded” as in what is now called influencers. Hence the need for a more professional-looking product.
Many readers came to NC via a link or mention on another site. In this overcrowded news/commentary environment, it behooves us to increase our visibility.
Corey Doctorow just did “a how to” use creative commons art to make relevant artwork for specific stories.
https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/21/collages-r-us/
I can’t promise that what I come up with would be any good but I would happily give it a shot and not be at all offended if you opted to go with someone else.
uMy view is that graphics would be better used only where they add information to the article – for example a map or a graph.
But I can also see the need to make something visually appealing.
However in the example shown, I think the top image adds nothing to the article – and I feel this would be the same for most AI images (most that I’ve seen are terrible). The good AI images are ones where you don’t notice the image is AI.
Finally, I noticed in the past few months, Duckduckgo stopped bringing up NC as a search result (as well as other non MSM news sites) and I finally switched to Brave. I don’t know if a bit of SEO might be needed (however, it could be censorship), but this could be a lot of work in itself.
Thanks for the thought but SEO is snake oil and Google keeps tweaking its algos to defeat it.
I worked for a newspaper back in the late 80s/ early 90s. The general rule of thumb was that not every story required a graphic. I’d suggest setting the bar a little lower, maybe the top two pieces getting artwork. Expand or substract according to editorial need, not just for templating purposes.
Cold War Steve is a brilliant collagist (albeit out of our league financially):
Do not engage the services of any designer who gives a shit about “what you like”, or even pretends that they do.
You wouldn’t hire a professional in any other field who accepted a brief that required that they produce something that you like. Your design brief should stick to what it is that you want to achieve (you’re already mostly there), it must be a formal, written document, the designer in turn should be required to produce a document that demonstrates that he/she understands the brief and is capable of undertaking a process that achieves its goals — and the design should be judged solely on whether or not it will achieve the desired results as set out in the brief.
What you like doesn’t matter: You are not your target market; you already read Naked Capitalism.
(And an unsolicited professional opinion: as much as I respect The Cradle as an online publication, theirs is not an appropriate design for NC — if anything, take a closer look at The Grayzone.)
Sorry, I have havehired designers (set, costume, and graphic designers in theater) and architects, graphic and web designers later, and also I disagree. The few times I hired someone who was determined to run roughshod over me, I had to fire them pretty pronto.
Architects uniformly say the clients who get the best results are the ones that are most specific about what they want.
And the newsletter is for people who know us to make us more top of mind with them. so your premise is incorrect.
I also think Lambert was a bit off beam in saying we want an artist. We want someone more like a graphic artist or an ad designer.
I am astonished at your interpretation of what I wrote. I very emphatically stated that you, as the client, must be in control over the entire process, starting with the development of a comprehensive design brief that lays out precisely what you are setting out to achieve, what resources you have to devote to the process, which individual or group within your organization has approval authority, what your budget is, what your timeline is, and so on.
You are the client, and it is your right, your obligation, to set the goals and the parameters within which they must be achieved.
What you shouldn’t do, is try to be the designer. If you insist on being the designer, you will waste your time and money (and the less of that you have, the more important it is that you don’t waste it) — in which case you might as well just cobble something together by yourself. If the object is merely to develop something “you like”, do it yourself — you are after-all the best judge of whatever that might be. In that case, though you won’t need a designer, you may need what is known (admittedly pejoratively) in the profession as a “wrist” — they are cheap like borscht and will do whatever makes you happy — all they care about is what you like.
If you do hire a real designer, tell him or her what you need — but not how to achieve it; if you find that insufficiently imposing, tell her or him what you insist upon, what you demand, be as assertive as you are inclined to be, but the design brief should not attempt to define the solution, and it must not be a mushy, meaningless instruction to give us something like this, something we like. With all due respect to your extensive experience as a design client, no serious professional designer will have the slightest inclination or need, to waste their time “run[ning] roughshod over” you (that sort of confrontation is a symptom of a flawed process), but he, she or them, will insist on working to a serious design brief, upon which the design solution can be based — and judged.
(I don’t wish to blow my cover, but I write as a [retired] senior partner of a very large and successful, multi-disciplinary design consultancy with clients worldwide, which never ran roughshod over anyone, including pro bono clients, but which did insist on a serious, professional process, and earned big bucks by providing clients with what they needed.)
I have to use Photoshop for one of my jobs and can say that the basic process of creating a collage is not very complicated. You use layers, the magic wand select option to get transparent backgrounds, feather the selection before cutting, flatten image, etc. However, I am not a professional designer, and the important part is not the tooling or knowing how to drive it, but the artistic sense and design chops of the person doing the collage.
I’ve tried the new Photoshop AI – Generative Fill feature just to see what all the brouhaha is about, but my feeling is that the results heavily skew towards the uncanny valley. This is probably not going to be very compelling for expanding your audience.
My thought is: your best bet would be to find somebody in your network who is already doing collage illustration, and who might be willing to do a little work for NC. Agree with Don, above, that you should be prepared to give the designer a lot of freedom to mostly just do what they do, with only basic input from NC. I have worked with professional graphic designers on several occasions (magazine covers, glossy event flyers, etc.), and that was generally how it went.
Am I correct in thinking that these revisions would discontinue the email I get everyday shortly after 7:00 am America/NewYork time?
If so, then I would oppose those revisions, since what I currently get provides me with just enough reading material to start the day.
Observations:
A newsletter may be better with a single striking image up top rather than many images. As I keep reminding people–these days, a word is worth a thousand pictures. There are photos everywhere–too many.
The newsletter would then be easier as an e-mail blast: Less memory, less kludge.
The most important matter is that the newsletter come out regularly and often: Every Friday at noon? (Fortnightly, every fourteenth day, is too seldom.)
You may want to dip into Wikimedia Commons. There is much that is easily licensed.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
Don’t think of “featuring” work of an artist for the exposure. That never works out. You’ll have to pay.
Oddly, Flickr now has a commons. It may be a source. There are some excellent photographers on Flickr, but they do charge. Not always as much as big names, though.
https://www.flickr.com/commons/usage/
I’m not sure about collage. I have worked at so many places with so many people who thought that easy-surrealism has some great eye appeal. My eyes glaze over. Dalì had plenty of off-days. (You know that I read Fatto Quotidiano, which does this collage stuff on page 1 each day. And when it fails–che puzzo!)
Hi. I come here daily, and I’ve done those types of collages before (though now the bulk of my work is video). I’d be happy to help. Contact me if you’re interested.
If the root problem is circulation below where it ought to be, may I suggest a few other things? Here goes:
The design of the site. It’s getting a bit long in the tooth, and, on a daily basis, it can be a bit hard to read. An easy fix would be to increase the line spacing or leading. That might make it a bit better for those with aging eyes.
Social media. Yes, I know. This isn’t a place with a lot of love for social media. But have you considered posting on Twitter? Or, as it’s now known, X? That could help with the site traffic.
Podcasts. Nowadays, it seems like everyone has one, and that can be good and bad. But Yves, darn it, you have lovely speaking voice! You’d be a lovely podcast guest. So, get a list of podcast hosts and start pitching. You’ll have to pitch a ton to get a few, but that’s life in the pitching game.
Me again. Here’s another idea: If you want more newsletter subscribers, well, ask people to subscribe! You can use one of those popups, which a lot of people don’t like, but they do work.
You can also add a banner across the bottom of every page and ask people to subscribe that way. Just note your newsletter page’s link in the banner, add enticing copy, and that could help boost your subscriber count.
NC is already on Twitter at @yvessmith. There is also @nakedcapitalism, but it seems inactive.
I’m a regular reader who primarily does computer animation, but I have some experience in graphic design and a bit of technical know-how and would be happy to share some ideas / thoughts.
My two cents as someone who did a lot of collages to go along with news articles. They are fairly easy to make technically, but the real challenge is finding an idea that clicks, which requires a person with a lot of visual culture, and the materials you need to make it work. When there was a need to stick to materials without restrictive copyright, it was always a drag on my productivity (not arguing anything either way, just informing). I would say each image would take around a quarter to half a day to produce, depending on the complexity of the task and time it would take to come up with a good idea.
If the purpose is just to add visuals, I don’t know if it adds a lot to just go with quality over quantity. I personally dislike the unimaginative dabbler look of many collages in independent news sites that just look like a bunch of too obvious symbols thrown together under a filter. It just makes them look amateurish and by extension, detracts from how seriously the information being conveyed is considered. So my suggestion is to not think of the images that accompany the newsletter as a sticker that you slap on articles to illustrate them, but as shiny pieces of art that have to stand by themselves and that people look forward to seeing along with the rest of all the content. If so, it might be a good idea to start small, have one good piece per newsletter that really works for the most important article or vibe of the week, see how long or difficult the process is and only then scale to produce more if it makes sense to do so.
Regarding “AI”, I’ve been using it to pump out quick posts for social media. I think it only produces good results under the same conditions as collages, meaning having someone at the helm that has a lot of visual culture and knows how to guide the references to produce something visually interesting and not just “slightly glossy sexy elf with instagram filter #1540756”. I sometimes take a peek at the Midjourney Discord to see what people are coming up with, and you can really tell the difference when someone has even the slightest amount of visual culture. The thing that has really shocked me about generative image tools is how much people’s imaginations have been lobotomized, so that when presented with infinite possibilities, they choose Marvel characters with Instagram aesthetics. Depressing.
Regardings the ethics of it, I’m conflicted. I got out of art and design as a full time occupation, but my friends still in it have seen an immediate and dramatic impact on their earnings that goes along with the explosion in productivity that generation permits (the bearded one strikes again). A project that might have used a team of designers now just uses a prompter and a guy to do some touchups. I’ve heard reports, for example, of political campaigns that would pay 15000 euros now just paying 2000. And who is going to pay hundreds of euros for a portrait when AI can just print as many variations as you wish until you get the one that tickles your ego just right? I just don’t think you can go back, the productivity gains are too massive for capital to surrender the tech and the public loves it too. I’ve seen some pretty tech illiterate family members use it just for fun. It will probably never be as good as the real article, but that was never the point, it just has to be good enough that you can get rid of most of your staff and just keep a guy to snip the errant extra finger here and there. On the other hand, whether done by sons of bitches for no good reasons or not, it does democratize, simplify and massively accelerate the process of image creation and for indie outlets with chronic manpower shortages, it leaves you more time for the stuff that machines can’t do, like actual sleuthing, cultivating sources and putting words to the page.
Wishing you guys the best of luck in finding ways to break through the blockade. If anyone can do it, it’s the NC gang.