GB: I wonder if you feel personally disappointed by this. When I look at the board of SND, it is all people working for American newspapers. It must be discouraging to see that consistently these are not the papers chosen as the most innovative, as the best.

SG: Sure. It is discouraging.

GB: There is a bit of irony to it.

SG: Yes. But it also shows that this isn’t us sitting over here saying that this is purely a U.S.-focused society. We want to serve the cause of design all over the world. One of the points of pride in our general competition is when we have entrants from even more countries.

But we do see less and less American papers. It is happening. When you see something like this, is it a surprise? Sure. Is it disheartening? Absolutely. Because we all want to say that we are doing it right. We want this to be the gold standard that every newspaper aspires to.

GB: In a way, it seems like you all might be sending a message to your owners.

SG: There’s no question that we are. It doesn’t even have to say, “Did you notice there’s no American newspapers on here?” It’s obvious. And when Hartford made it, it was a source of pride for American newspapers.

GB: With papers going increasingly online, how are these design elements moving there?

SG: We do have awards already for online. And those have been around for several years, and they recognize innovative things happening online. I think this year and the coming year you are going to see a dramatic upsurge in devotion to resources and devotion to added value online. Right now, I think you are seeing it in pockets. They are all trying to figure it out very quickly because they don’t want to be left behind. In the past year, there is no question that the level of work that’s been done in video, in graphics, in multimedia has exploded exponentially, and I think there’s no end in sight for that. Also, in the best of all worlds, they will be able to achieve convergence between the papers and on-line. To me, the best possible solution is that those two continue to feed off each other. That, in print, we are guiding readers to our on-line features to see added value, to see flash graphics, photo galleries. And then, that we are driving people from the website to the newspaper, and it becomes an extension of the newspaper. And the papers that are doing that really well, are seeing the synergy already.

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