The Sad Story of the Pioneer Press, as Seen in Two Illustrations

I used to write about a wonderful illustrator who worked for the St. Paul Pioneer Press, Kirk Lyttle. (My past posts can be seen here.) He made subscribing to the paper worth it, all on his own.

Kirk took the buyout a number of years ago, and as with most other things at the PiPress since it was sold to extractive capital, the design and illustration have gone down hill (if not off a cliff).

Case in point, the illustration on the front of the Life section this Sunday:


The story is about stage blood and how to do it right (a Halloween topic). Unfortunately, the illustration does it all wrong.

• The color contrast is so poor that you can't even discern the character's right arm and hand (one the left side of the illustration).
• The incredibly busy area below the SEEING RED headline is unintelligible at a glance. After studying it for a while, I figured out it's supposed to portray a person with light blue hair wearing a pink and white mask and holding a flask that looks like a bubble, standing in front of a brown-draped background. The dark arc on the light blue hair is supposed to be the mask's strap. I'm still not sure what the pinkish blob below the chin is supposed to be... part of a tie, maybe?
• It looks as though there's a hole in the person's chest, with a beam of light or something shooting downward into the red liquid... but I think instead it's supposed to be a spoon coming up out of the liquid, and the dark oval on the end of the spoon handle is just supposed to be a knob... or something like that.

Whatever.

The illustrator is credited as Mary Hilleren / Special to the Pioneer Press, which means in newspaper usage that she is not employed by the Pioneer Press but was hired as a commissioned illustrator. I think that's actually worse than if she were an employee attempting to do illustrations that are clearly beyond her skill level.

Hilleren also did another illustration in late summer (which I don't think had a credit), which was almost worse:


It didn't have the same color contrast problems (I can discern each badly conceived part of it very clearly, partly because she put black outlines on the figures), but the drawing and composition are just so clueless and unprofessional.

In looking into this, I found that Mary Hilleren is not just a freelance illustrator for the PiPress, though: she's also doing page layout, which used to be a full-time job at the paper, employing multiple people. So I think what happened was the paper lost or eliminated all or almost all of their design and layout staff, and they are making do with contractors who work very cheap and occasionally improvise their own illustrations.

The shame is on the newspapers' owners, rather than this particular person, who is doing the best she can. But still. Ugh.

Why do I pay the owners of the Pioneer Press money for a subscription at this point, if they are going to serve up juvenile content like this? I guess I maintain my sub to get the little bit of St. Paul-specific news still written by their few staff reporters (like Fred Melo and Bob Shaw). And to keep Rubén Rosario in health insurance. (I used to like reading Julio Ojeda-Zapata's thoughts on tech, but I guess he's running their website these days, so no more words from him.) That's about it.

We all know that newspapers are trapped in a burning business model, but the ownership of the Pioneer Press has made it a thousand percent worse than it has to be. One of these days I will have to figure out if it's worth it.