Chris Snider

When Chris Snider was a kid, he was enthralled by an early page-design program called “The Newsroom,” which featured a then-staggering collection of five fonts and allowed users to design their own newsletters. Stints as a designer at The Sun in Baltimore and news design director at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch gave the adult Snider more tools to push the envelope, as he did by convincing editors to run poster front pages throughout the St. Louis Cardinals’ 2004 World Series run.

“I constantly pushed for us to try new things,” he says.

Now 32 and The Des Moines Register’s assistant managing editor for digital and innovation, Snider brings the same sensibility to the paper’s online offerings, including new excursions into mobile, live sports coverage, content-distribution widgets, video-sharing partnerships with Google and YouTube, and, in an homage to his design roots, multiple versions of the site’s home page to accommodate different kinds of news events.

“He doesn’t allow our digital products to stay the same for long,” says Editor Carolyn Washburn.

Snider arrived in Des Moines in 2005 as the editor of Juice (www.dmjuice.com), the Register’s hybrid print/Web product geared to 18-to-34-year-olds. “It was a challenge to convince them to hire me, because my background was in design,” he says, but his clips from covering sports and the video game industry at The Sun and the Post-Dispatch won editors over. He became assistant managing editor for digital and innovation at the Register in August 2007 and quickly developed a knack for finding the right outside providers.

“When you want user-submitted video, you go to the place where people submit videos,” says Snider, who credits his current side gig teaching journalism at Drake University in Des Moines as one font of inspiration. “It gives me the opportunity to know what the kids are up to and stay ahead of things.”

Connections: The Des Moines Register, 715 Locust St., Des Moines, Iowa 50309, (515) 284-8712, csnider@dmreg.com

By Mark Toner