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Times Insider

How Our Special Print Section on the Mueller Report Came Together

Meet the people who prepared the 16-page section — and a jam-packed single-topic front page — for readers’ doorsteps.

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An early blueprint of Friday’s front page and the version sent to print at 8:30 p.m. on Thursday.

Times Insider explains who we are and what we do, and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.

It is around 3 p.m., and the next day’s print edition of The New York Times is beginning to take shape.

The print hub, a group of 56 journalists at The Times whose job is to shepherd the day’s news articles from their original, digital presentations to the next day’s physical paper, is at work. (An additional 16 work on feature sections, like Travel and Real Estate.) Planners have been tracking the news all day. Editors have determined which articles will run in the newspaper. Now it’s time for news designers to create the recognizable framework of the print paper.

The Times established the print hub in 2017. Shoulder-to-shoulder in long rows of desks, the designers are back together, alongside editors, photo editors and news assistants.

The 17 full-time news designers in the print hub, assigned to daily news and advance projects, are builders and keepers of structure. But they are also wardrobe professionals. They dress each story, and its shape, with headline fonts that fit the tone of news. Dark, squat lettering for hard news. A more delicate iteration for features. And a straighter block type for news somewhere in between. A balance and variety of sizes and fonts are important to the presentation.

On Thursday, the full 448-page report on the special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation was released to the public shortly after 11 a.m. The print hub decided almost immediately to run a special section in Friday’s paper. There was little time to waver — the printing plants across the country must know what to expect.

It is a moment when every gear in the news operation is turning.

Amy Kelsey, the deputy director of news design, keeps track of small details, like the point size of headlines, but also stays mindful of larger concerns, like the messaging that the locations of articles convey.

“The way we pay attention to packaging and presentation gives a good feel for hierarchy,” Ms. Kelsey said.

The print hub is the latest chapter in the evolution of news design at The Times.

Before Tom Bodkin became the design director of The Times in 1987, journalists who put the pages together weren’t even called designers. They were makeup editors; each got a list of articles and some photographs, and tried to make it all fit and look good. The makeup editors sat together.

“Up until then, the inside news pages were not really looked at seriously from a design standpoint,” Mr. Bodkin said.

So Mr. Bodkin, who is now the creative director of The Times, embedded designers with reporters and editors. Developing more news judgment in design could “maximize the effectiveness of a story,” Mr. Bodkin said.

“Good designers want to reflect what editors have in their heads,” he said.

So sports designers sat with sports editors. National designers sat with national editors. The model held for 30 years.

Today, three million subscribers read The Times only online. As this audience grew and developed different habits, it became clear that the digital platform would require a different production track. To provide a digital report with minute-by-minute updates, and one with a thoughtful print curation for readers who expect it, the processes had to be separated.

On Thursday, digital readers could follow Times journalists as they combed through the special counsel’s redacted report and provided a live play-by-play of their observations and analysis online. Today, print readers have a 16-page section that a group of enterprise designers spent an entire day creating, including 13 pages of executive summaries reprinted in the 8.5-by-11-inch size released by the Justice Department.

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“We’re not manipulating it,” said Andrew Sondern, an art director. “There’s an obligation to present some of it unfettered by our analysis.”

The special section comes in addition to extensive front-page coverage of the report. Mr. Bodkin drew the blueprint, which has four articles beneath a banner headline, all driven by the Mueller report. It’s an unusual modern Times front page in that there is no feature photography.

“Today we relied on typography for visual relief,” Mr. Bodkin said, “reflecting the importance of the words of the Mueller report.”

Looking at old New York Times pages, some marks of the print product remain. The one-column A-head, with its lines of tall, condensed type, has appeared on front-page stories for at least 100 years.

But it is also clear that the design approach to the news sections has changed considerably. The reader’s progression, the flow of the pages, is something closer to a magazine experience than it used to be. International, National and New York sections are clearly delineated.

Articles are packaged more purposefully. News is organized more deliberately. Designers are empowered to think like the journalists they are. It is, Mr. Bodkin said, “a coherent experience.”


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A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 2 of the New York edition with the headline: How the Print Paper Comes Together. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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