Word: panoramas
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Francisco Panorama is actually the 33rd issue of McSweeney's Quarterly, a literary journal known for its novel packaging. Previous issues have been sold as cigar boxes and bundles of mail. But the Panorama issue is different. The one-time experiment was conceived by Eggers to prove that print media weren't dead...
...that extent, the Panorama achieves its goal. The publication is a graphic designer's dream, with full-page charts on everything from "The Crisis in the Congo" to how to butcher a lamb. It is easy to read and aesthetically pleasing, and there's just no way people would get through Porterfield's 22,000-word investigation into the jumbled finances of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge if they read it on the Internet. Every piece of reporting is factual and accurate, and McSweeney's tendency toward honesty - the Congo is "confusing," the bridge's funds "impossible" to track...
...there's plenty to criticize about the project too: the Panorama took nine months and more than 150 people to produce. Only seven of them were full-time staff members. Reporters didn't have word limits. The Bay Bridge investigation was funded by outside sources (San Francisco Public Press and Spot.us). None of the sports section's 16 pages contain game scores; eight of them are filled by a Stephen King essay on the World Series. Most of the paper went to press weeks before it came out, making it a poor source for breaking news. (The front section...
Eggers isn't stupid. He knows the Panorama has shortcomings and admits it wouldn't work as a daily concern. "I don't think any one paper would look like this on a given day," he says. "We're just saying that other publications could take some of these features and sprinkle them into the mix." To him, Panorama works best when thought of as a "concept car at an auto show" - something that's sleek and beautiful but wholly unnecessary for someone who just wants to drive to the grocery store...
...people want it. They get their breaking news from the Internet, their sports scores on TV; the thousands of people who ventured into bookstores and coffee shops in search of Panorama weren't looking for that. They wanted the full-color comics, the hilarious account of a California liberal's first NASCAR race and an article titled "Are Michelle Obama's Eyebrows Too Angry-Seeming?" They wanted something well written, insightful and fun. Something that could handle in-depth investigations, thousand-word essays and an article on how to make moonshine...