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Coincidentally, I just today received my copy of this year's Best of Newspaper Design annual from the Society for News Design.

Thinking about this post, I leafed quickly through to the Redesigns section. And frankly, looking at the befores-and-afters reinforces my argument. All the redesigns look incremental.

The most dramatic in the annual is probably The Guardian in the U.K., and even that overhaul is more cosmetic than fundamental. In all the cases, the "before" product wasn't broken, and the "after" product just didn't seem all that different.

Newspapers spend a lot of money on redesigns that don't have the impact they want and, these days especially, need on reader interest. If they reinvested those design resources on their growth products (specifically, Internet products) I bet we wouldn't be lamenting the sorry state of news Web design nearly as much.