Poynter/Romanesko: Want a Well-Designed Newspaper? Go to Europe.

I read an interview from the Columbia Journalism Review with Scott Goldman, the head of the Society of News Design. Every year SND hands out awards to the world's best designed newspapers. This year, for the first time no American paper was on its' top five list. There wasn't even an English speaking paper among them.
Goldman says American papers are falling behind because they are being to conservative with their graphics. Papers in other country's and especially smaller papers have adapted more quickly to the growing demand for graphically rich news and have had more confidence in producing complex design.
It makes sense that the older institutions in the U.S. would be resistant to giving up print space in favor of graphics. As news moves more and more to the web though I think it will be imperative for news organizations to be able to present their stories graphically. When you look at the winners of the SND competition their front pages almost all look like website front pages. The stories contain a headline and a lead paragraph and then are jumped to another space in the paper. It seems like a sort of reverse engineering where first the websites were built to look like the front page and now the front page is being modeled after the web page. Our brains are being rewired by the internet and our papers are going to have to fight to keep up.