In Journalism, Display Isn't Everything -- But Almost

Bob Watts, formerly the art director of the web-zine Salon.com, died of cancer recently. Though a devoted Salon.com reader, I'd never heard of the guy until I read the tributes his colleagues posted about him today at the site.

I also share an inability to explain what drew me to these postings. Perhaps it was just a desire to read something different on a lazy Sunday afternoon. More likely, it was the intriguing notion of an art director remembered for his "fearlessness."

I learned a lot about salon.com by reading these tributes -- and as a devoted reader of the site, I am grateful to have a bit of a feel for what it is like to work there. I find myself wishing I had stopped in when I was in San Francisco a few months ago -- Salon employees sound like people who wouldn't mind hanging out a bit with a random reader wandering by.

In fact, they reminded me of my colleagues at Maine Times, the now-defunct alternative newsweekly where I worked as a staff writer from 1986 to 1990. That's not terribly surprising, since alternative newsweeklies are the historical antecedents for Salon.com (and phenomena like Salon.com clearly the present, and the future, of the kind of journalism alternative newsweeklies first invented in the 1960s).

My colleagues at Maine Times were all better reporters than I was, but at least I had enough insight to hang around the art department. It was my custom to hover over the drafting tables to see how my stories were going to look on the page. The folks doing the work at those tables certainly knew I took a lively interest in their endeavors. Though I am not certain, I believe they thought it a good thing that a writer cared about where his words were going.

Graphics seemed so key to me that I knew the paper was in trouble when, in 1988, it commissioned a total redesign from the guy who had recently done the same thing for the Boston Globe. Unfortunately they guy had only one design in him, and soon Maine Times looked like a tabloid version of the Globe. Gone was the distinctive, if home-grown, look of Maine Times, with its bold images and the banner emblazoned in duplicate across the top of the cover, in the typeface also used for that purpose by Vanity Fair but, to my recollection, nobody else.

The long slow death of Maine Times is someting I date from that juncture. Twenty years old at the time, the paper sputtered on for another decade or so, through not one gut two more ownership regimes. I knew just when to leave; my parting gift in 1990 was the original of an Earth Day poster Maine Times commissioned from contribuing artist Robert Shetterly. The going-away present for the person who left after me was a pink slip.

Thus my visceral appreciation for why the good people of Salon.com would be especially bereaved by the death of a beloved colleague whose art gave the web-zine a distinctive look. I was especially moved by what King Kaufman, Salon's excellent sports columnist, recalled about his deceased colleague: "He was one of those guys who could be good at pretty much anything that interested him, and it seemed like everything interested him. He's the only person I've ever known who was fascinated by art, technology, music, kids, photography, food -- and horse racing. And that's just the stuff I know about and remember."

Bob Watts sounds like the kind of person few of us have the pleasure, and the honor, of working alongside. And it's remarkable that he cared about art -- so much so that he went to the trouble of starting to do that for a living at midlife, first arriving at Salon to serve an internship, as reported in the tributes.

At the government agency that comprises my day job my office has the best art in the place. And, on Monday, I will try to be a better colleague than I was on Friday.

P.S. I hope, in the circumstances, that the Bob Watts image I appropriated, above, from Salon.com falls within the "fair use" doctrine of the federal copyright law.