WHAT'S NEXT: INNOVATIONS IN NEWSPAPERS

“Video is the future for Telegraph photographers” says Stuart Nicol, the newly appointed London’s Daily Telegraph Executive Editor (Pictures).

He tells to EPUK that the future of the Telegraph’s photojournalism lies in shooting video.

“Digital stills photography will, when we look back on it, form a very small period of time in the history of photojournalism.”

“Telegraph photographers will undoubtably be shooting solely on video in the future, and certainly within a year we hope to be well advanced down that route.”

At the Press Association, where Stuart Nicol has been Group Picture Editor since January this year, all of their 42 staff photographers are now equipped with £300 Canon S3 cameras for shooting internet-quality video in addition to their existing Canon stills cameras.

Newspaper designers are screaming against what they consider an “advertising invasion” into the newshole.

Well, as I said before, I don’t have any problem with “premium space” for “premium ads”, including front pages.

The question is, as always, real creativity.

In newsdesigner you will find a link to a PSD from the Newspaper Association of America (NAA), presenting some of this “new” ad formats.

But you will see a few good ones and a lot of bad ones.

Advertising creativity in print media is, I am sorry, still very, very poor.

Giving more freedom to bad ads will be a serious problem for newspapers that don’t care about clean and easy to read design.

Here there are three excellent examples of good, bad and really bad ones:

1. The classifieds page is fine with me.

2. The Hiundai ad looks great but the double spread is a disaster. Wrong option again.

3. The Nashville Symphony ad makes the reading of he California piece very painful and the ad format does not make sense to me at all.

ESPN’s Mobile Virtual Network Operator (MVNO) has decided to close its doors after less than a year of operations.

This is no surprise to me. At first I thought ESPN had developed a mobile service available to all US carriers but when I realized that it was indeed launched as a “carrier” I immediately thought it wouldn’t last long.

We all value our content a lot but US consumers are not ready to defect their mobile carriers and even change their phones just to get a certain kind of content, much less if its of a single nature, in this case, sports.

I’m sure ESPN Mobile will do much better if and when they release their excellent mobile portal to any user in any carrier.

Mobile ESPN – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The newspaper killing season is open.

The Economist cover story wanted to kill the newspaper.

Steve Outing wants now to kill newspaper print editors, and substitute them by former online editors.

And Jeff Jarvis announces “the death of the editorialists.”

“As newspapers face economic torture, it is time to ask whether they can afford editorialists when spare resources should go toward supporting their true value: local reporting.”

Well, I am not sure that all these deaths will change and improve newspapers.

Newspapers are not dead, but they will kill themselves when they don’t see the need of radical re-evolutions.

Newspaper print editors are not dead, but we will kill themselves when they don’t see the need on bi-media, on and off line integrated newsrooms.

Newspaper editorialists are not dead, but they will kill themselves when they don’t lead interactive opinion pages and public discussion forums.

My impression is that everybody has to re-think its role in this new media landscape.

From publishers and editors to reporters and visual journalists.

Let’s not kill anything or anybody else.

We don’t need more casualties.

Nobody is safe, sure, but at the same time the best way to survive is not a war but a passionate, engaging and compelling new way of journalism life.

This is an industry with too many years of confrontations.

Editors versus Publishers.

News versus Features.

Hard News versus Soft News.

On Line versus Off Line Journalism.

Words versus Images.

Pictures versus Graphics.

News versus Opinion.

Advertising versus News.

Mono-Media versus Multi-Media Companies.

Editors versus Reporters.

Print versus Broadcasting.

Infographists versus Illustrators…

Let’s work together.

Let’s integrate.

Newspapering is a team game.

We need less solo-players, and more orchestra-players.

Including the conductor-editors.

A few weeks ago we posted two comments about the terrible design of The New York Times Book Review, and now, oh my God!, we can announce that our voice has been heard.

Yes.

Steven Heller is out, Nicholas Blechman is in.

Heller, an excellent writer about design, but a terrible newspaper design editor, goes out for a 6 month sabbatical…

And next week, Nicholas Blechman, one of the most brilliant designers of The New York Times (working now in the Sunday section The Week in Review, that has improved a lot under his tenure) is taking over.

The readers of The New York Times are the winners.

What a great opportunity to change the Book Review!

My 10 first suggestions:

1. Tell me about the books, but also about the authors and the publishers.

2. Include more and more comments from readers (compare with Amazon reviews), authors and book publishers.

3. Add references and suggestions about similar books and similar issues.

4. Develop great cover-stories like:

“Is still New York the capital of the book publishing world?

“The next Da Vinci Code: The leading best candidates”

“The print book is dead. God save the printing book industry!”

“Why young people read more books and less newspapers than ever”

“Who is going to be the next Harry Potter according J. K. Rowling”

5. Compare best-selling lists, and explain the differences.

6. Publish the biggest flops, and tell us why these books fail.

7. Interview the world best on and off line book reviewers.

8. Expand the reviews to digital books, and to the new digital publishing industry.

9. Link, link, link to blogs, websites, chats, forums… and interact with your audience on and off line.

10. Improve the design dramatically, and after his 6 month sabbatical, fire Seteven Heller.

Amen.

Some people see Google as the enemy in our industry. I think we have a lot to thank them. For one, substantially improving the effectiveness of advertising and with that making advertising a viable model online.
8 years ago, few believed that advertising could be a sustainable business model on the Web but now, thanks in part to Google’s advertising innovations, which have been copied by many, it is possible to be profitable with an advertising business model.

A team of INNOVATION consultants spoke in the last two days at the 2006 Expo Publishing Expo and Conference in Moscow.

Russian publishers and editors are changing.

A few headlines from our presentations:

-Javier Zarracina, Spain (infographics consultant):

“Newspapers need journalists, not artists.”

“Infographists must be just visual journalists.”

-Christian Oliver, USA (new media consultant):

“Traditional media must integrate on and off line news and commercial operations.”

“Your audience is now a multi-media consumer, and you must reach them by any way available. Our newsrooms are becoming organizations in continuous deadline.”

-Javier Errea, Spain (design consultant):

“Readers demand new ways to present the news.”

“The graphic-information pannels that we created for EXPRESSO in Portugal shows how you can innovate and improve your story-telling languages.”

-Gianluca Bovoli, Italy (editorial marketing consultant):

“Don’t promote your newspaper or magazine without improving your editorial product. Many promotions don’t work just because they are promoting the wrong product. Change the product first, and then invest on promotions.”

“Games are back. See the great success of LIBERO in Italy with the political game LiberoTutti.”

-Juan Antonio Giner, USA (INNOVATION director):

“The newspaper industry is booming.”

“You kill a newspaper when you don’t change, and don’t innovate.”

“Multimedia newsrooms are a must. The question is not yes or not, but how.”

“The Daily Telegraph is right now a good example of how a very traditional newspaper company has to change and innovate.”

Engadget has posted very good pictures of Sony’s upcoming ebook reader, which has been postponed a few times.

This is the first consumer product to include the famous eInk technology. Supposedly, this screen should read just like paper.

It will be interesting to see what kind of welcome this device receives and how many publishers join its store.

See more pictures at Engadget:
Sony Reader PRS-500 hands-on + Connect Reader screenshots – Engadget

More information about the device in Sonystyle.com

Bono was a good editor for The Independent.

The paper sold almost 700.000 copies.

Last week, Armani did the same as editor of the paper.

This was his cover.

I am sure that the sales will be also bigger than normal.

My questions are:

Do we need celebrities to improve the sales of newspapers?

What if we replace current editors not justy one day but a full week?

What if we do the same replacing newspaper designers with the iPod or Nokia designers?

What if we replace our newspaper photo editors with magazine ones?

What if we rotate the editors position and every week the editor is a different reporter?

What if we try with the marketing director?

What if we offer the position to the advertising director?

Perhaps wer will discover better ideas, we will find better leaders, and we will sell more papers.

I am in Moscow for the new two days speaking at the 2006 Russian Publishing Conference and Expo organized by the Russian Newspaper Publishers Association (GIPP).

Timothy Balding , the first speaker, CEO of the World association of Newspaper (WAN) told the audience that Russia will become the fastest growing newspaper market of the world.

Some interesting data from his presentation:

-Newspapers are now a 180 billion USD global industry, reaching daily more than 1,2 billion readers.

-Rupter Murdoch is investing almost 1 billion USD in the new printing presses for his newspapers in the UK.

-The Courier and Mail in Australia is becoming the most successful case of the new “compact” newspapers with a 158% circulation growth.

-Free newspapers are now the circulation leaders right now in Denmark, Switzerland and Spain.

-Free papers capture in Demark 64% of the total circulation of the newspaper market, and 54% in Spain.

Timothy Balding said also that free newspapers are “inspiration for traditional newspapers.”