WHAT'S NEXT: INNOVATIONS IN NEWSPAPERS

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The founder of Le Monde, the venerable Hubert Beuve-Mery didn’t like long meetings and he favored news meetings in his office “a la Japanese” with all the editors standing up.

A good way to keep them short and not boring.

Well, The Guardian in London is better  and more funky with these yellow sofas.

Send me please more pictures of real news meeting rooms, and traditions.

Today is the Fourth of July and many American newspapers use their front pages not for news but for a traditional display of patriotism.

Only in America!

The Richmond one is, by the way, a sure SND winner.

First rule in old fashion newspapers: don’t talk about your paper or your editors.

Other will do it, but you better do your work and avoid self-promotion, self-propaganda and self-complacency.

Well, this is not what The New York Times did a few days ago with this embarrassing piece about the “Page One Room”

Jeff Jarvis is quite right in his blog when he calls it “an unselfconsciously narcissistic feature ”

As Jeff says, the Times feature takes us inside the Pope’s chapel:

“The table was formidable: oval and elegant, with curves of gleaming wood. The editors no less so: 11 men and 7 women with the power to decide what was important in the world.”

Too narcissistic?

Yes, very much.

And, oh boy, the room is really cheap.

The “oval-shaped, gleaming wood table” looks to me like a big coffin.

But what about a touch screen table?

What about terminals for each one of the participants?

What about walls ready to hang print pages or more screens to track the news, including your website?

What about digital news walls?

From 0 to 10, just a five.

It’s an analog news meeting room.

And we are in the digital world.

The New York Times too.

Picture by Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

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The Sun Sentinel’s front page opens with a black banner about the dark news about jobs, but then the main package of the page goes, let’s say, poetic.

While I always admire any efforts to produce front pages that are “different”, I cannot understand why newspapers have to ignore or downplay the real news.

Facebook leading the pack.

MySpace losing ground.

And Twitter on full speed.

In monthly unique visitors.

Via Compete.com

I collect unique and non conventional city guides.

And I found last weekend in Venice a literary one, just with words, no graphics, and no maps.

But with a fantastic title:

Venezia è un pesce.

By Tiziano Scarpa.

Only great headlines can say a lot with just a few smart words.

And a brilliant image that inspired also the logo for the hellovenice werbsite.

The gatroinstestinal system represented as a subway map.

Woot Shirt sells this t-shirt, designed by Jack Anderson.

(Thanks to Mario Tascon)

I took this picture in Venice, Italy, last Saturday before 3 pm.

This is something that I have seen in many Italian cities before.

The newsstands pack the unsold paper of the day…

So, if you want to get an Italian paper after 3 pm, good luck!

Well, this is a perfect example of who is killing our newspapers.

They are.

Read Jack Shafer’s post about “Blog Overkill. The danger of hyping a good thing into the ground.”

Shafer comments on the danger of fetishizing new technologies makes a lot of sense to me.

It dosen’t matter that he gets almost toasted, insulted and blamed as one who, of course, “doesn’t get it” by the usual suspects.

I really had a great pleasure reading his commonsense piece (thanks Toni) since the “big news” about the death of Michael Jackson was, you know, that a blogger scooped the traditional media.

Oh, boy!

And so, what?

What we need is analysis, explanation, ideas, journalism, information caviar, and not just tapas and speedy breaking news.

Good to know, and congratulations to the speedy blogger, but now let’s talk about the real subject.

The human tragedy of Michael Jackson, who - I am sorry, but I cannot find better way than to repeat the dramatic words of Andrew Sullivan - “HE DIED A WHILE AGO” and “HE REMAINED FOR SO LONG A WALKING HUMAN SHELL”

This what I am looking for:

Brilliant writers.

Smart journalists.

Journalism caviar.

In print.

Online.

On air.

All the time.

Full-time.

And the rest, darling, is “garbage in, garbage out.”

The death of MJ is another dramatic example of what I call empty front pages.

Many were just clonic journalism.

The same everywhere.

With no ”added-value” opinion or information for boring and expected headlines.

What would I do?

Well, if I had writers like Andrew Sullivan at my paper, I would just print his opinionated and insightful comment in big type on the front page, plus his best words as the headline:

“HE DIED A WHILE AGO. HE REMAINED FOR SO LONG A WALKING HUMAN SHELL”

Or I would go for the one at the top of this post from Estado de Minas in Brazil, which at least shows a point of view (”Why he didn’t die”)

But first let’s see the “empty” ones, driven just by design considerations but with no post-news added value.

And then the pathetic clonic, no-brain, no-nothing ones:

Good news from RBS, one of the most innovative multimedia companies of Latin America:

The group opened yesterday a new printing plant in Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil.

The new building includes very modern Wifag presses.

In the picture you can see Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva at the inauguration ceremony, with my friends Nelson Pachecho Sirotsky, President of the company, and Jayme Sirotsky, Emeritus President of RBS.

RBS invested US $35 million in the industrial complex, located near Salgado Filho International Airport.

The objective is to improve and enlarge the printing and distribution of Zero Hora and Diário Gaúcho newspapers.

This investment reinforces the company’s belief in the future of print journalism, including its internet media extensions.

Today Zero Hora reaches an average of 183,000 copies – a growth of 345% since the founding of the newspaper, 45 years ago, and it’s the largest quality tabloid of Brazil.

The park takes the name of Jayme Sirotsky, the former President of the World Association of Newspapers (WAN).

The new facilities cover the equivalent of 15 basketball courts.

The Operational Director of RBS Group newspapers, Christiano Nygaard, said that the venture was motivated to better attend readers and advertisers.

The new Wifag prints up to 75,000 copies per hour – or 20.8 per second.

The expedition system Ferag will automatize supplement bookbinding.

The building has a “green roof” that softens the temperature inside, saving energy.

Domes of acrylic (transparent ice on the roof) amplify the natural lighting of the structure.

Another innovation is the storage of rainwater for use in anti-fire brigade.

RBS uses only paper provided by companies which offer forestation certification and vegetable-based ink, less polluting than the product of mineral origin.

As INNOVATION says, these could be the latest printing presses that RBS buys, and this also explains how fast this Brazilian company is changing the management structure of its multimedia operations.

Investing now in better quality printing is just another way to make the transition to the digital multimedia future.

I never understand how you can migrate to these new media scenarios when your printing products look poorly printed, with little and bad color, and a lousy distribution system.

First things first.

The best sketch about the King comes from Andrew Sullivan:

“There are two things to say about him.

He was a musical genius; and he was an abused child.

By abuse, I do not mean sexual abuse; I mean he was used brutally and callously for money, and clearly imprisoned by a tyrannical father.

He had no real childhood and spent much of his later life struggling to get one.

He was spiritually and psychologically raped at a very early age – and never recovered.

Watching him change his race, his age, and almost his gender, you saw a tortured soul seeking what the rest of us take for granted: a normal life.

But he had no compass to find one; no real friends to support and advise him; and money and fame imprisoned him in the delusions of narcissism and self-indulgence.

Of course, he bears responsibility for his bizarre life.

But the damage done to him by his own family and then by all those motivated more by money and power than by faith and love was irreparable in the end.

He died a while ago.

He remained for so long a walking human shell.

I loved his music.

His young voice was almost a miracle, his poise in retrospect eery, his joy, tempered by pain, often unbearably uplifting.

He made the greatest music video of all time; and he made some of the greatest records of all time. He was everything our culture worships; and yet he was obviously desperately unhappy, tortured, afraid and alone.

I grieve for him; but I also grieve for the culture that created and destroyed him.

That culture is ours’ and it is a lethal and brutal one: with fame and celebrity as its core values, with money as its sole motive, it chewed this child up and spat him out.

I hope he has the peace now he never had in his life.

And I pray that such genius will not be so abused again.”

Oh, boy: He died a while ago. He remained for so long a walking human shell.

You cannot say more in fewer words.

I got a lot of sad and warm messages about the tragic death of Eleftheros Typos, and I read angry comments in many Greek blogs about the end of this paper.

The best explanation of the crisis is in the blog of Spiros Polikandriotis. The fantastic former art director of ET was fired a few months ago - what a shame! - after months of fighting to keep and protect the original editorial and graphic concept of the INNOVATION prototypes:

“ET before the relaunch was selling around 10.000-15.000 a day and 45.000 on Sunday.

It was it’s lowest numbers since its birth on 1984.

After the  (INNOVATION) relaunch it started rising in circulation reaching 25.000 – 35.000 on the daily and 120.000 on Sunday.

These numbers were steady for at least 3-4 months.

After that the editorial model changed back to the old ways.”

The rest is history.

Thanks Spiros, and good luck to you and all your colleagues who produced the best-designed Greek newspaper ever, and fought a long, terrible battle for a new editorial model that was destroyed by political advisers and old fashioned editors and reporters - all with no jobs now.

What a lesson for all of them!