People remember what they see first. This is why the front page of a newspaper is always the most important. It's the first thing one sees, and it often decides whether or not someone will even read the paper. The front page tells the reader the most important stories. That is why Newseum, a website that displays numerous papers' front pages, is a great resource. While I was browsing Newseum, I took a look at two very different papers, The Wall Street Journal (based in New York) and the Daily News-Miner (based in Alaska), and examined the front page layouts of both of them.
The Wall Street Journal was very focused on the big picture. The writers fit a lot of stories onto its front page, and everything was compact and efficient. While the Daily News-Miner only included four stories on its front page, The Wall Street Journal fit eight. On both February 3rd and 4th (the dates when I examined the pages), The Wall Street Journal's big story was at the top underneath an unrelated, captioned photo. For both days, that big story related to the recent GameStop craze, and the images were of events in Europe. Interestingly enough, The Daily News-Miner had a similar layout. They placed their big stories (the election of a new Police Chief and news from a local hospital) at the very top of the page, with a large, exciting photo of another story underneath. They also had a sidebar that contained information about the local weather and aurora activity. The Wall Street Journal had a similar sidebar. However, their sidebar included headlines such as "A Russian court sentenced Kremlin critic Navalny to 3½ years in prison." Obviously, the Daily News-Miner is intended for more local readers, and The Wall Street Journal is designed for national or even global readers. Nevertheless, it is interesting to see how two papers with very different purposes are similar in some ways.
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