WHAT'S NEXT: INNOVATIONS IN NEWSPAPERS

The Boston Globe reports:

In a Nov. 17 letter, Times Co. chief executive Janet Robinson said the Globe remains an important Times Co. asset, and said the company was not interested in pursuing the sale, according to two executives who have seen the letter.

Executives close to the Welch group, which includes longtime Boston advertising executive Jack Connors and Boston concessionaire Joe O’Donnell, said the three had no plans to abandon their effort.

Welch, Connors, and O’Donnell began discussing a potential bid for the Globe several months ago. An analysis done for them by JP Morgan Chase & Co., the investment bank, valued the Globe at $550 million to $600 million, about half the $1.1 billion the Times Co. paid for the paper in 1993. The three men tentatively had committed $25 million each to the bid and intended to borrow much of the rest.

The rejection comes as the company is under pressure from some shareholders. One big shareholder, Morgan Stanley Investment Management, which owns 7.6 percent of the Times Co.’s stock, has submitted a proposal seeking governance changes.

Among them: putting the Times Co.’s dual-class share structure, which concentrates control in the hands of the Sulzberger family, to a shareholder vote and separating the jobs of chairman of the company and publisher of The New York Times. Both jobs are now held by Times Co. Chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr.

Times Co. stock is down about 8 percent this year in a market that has been hard on newspaper companies.

The Boston Globe circulation has been very weak.

Daily circulation fell 7 percent to 386,000 in the six months ended Sept. 30.

Sunday circulation fell 10 percent to 587,000.

Daily newspaper circulation in Massachusetts has fallen faster than the national average in the past year, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations, as the state’s technologically sophisticated population migrated to Internet news sources.

Average daily newspaper circulation in Massachusetts fell 6 percent in the past year, while daily circulation nationally fell 2.8 percent.

My feeling is this:

1. If The New York Times wants to play a leading role in the new online media landscape, needs to invest a lot of money and resources.

2. But the traditional operations are weaker and weaker, and the trend will accelerate.

3. The Boston Globe under The New York Times army is considered a local paper owned by ¨the people from New York¨

4. What Jack Welch see here is a great opportunity: to make the paper “local” again, and to help The New York Times to get cash that is needed for other business.

5. Unfortunately, The New York Times can not expect to make any profit from this sale: they paid too much and the Boston Globe is today, I am sorry, not worth of that price.

If “the world is flat” and the global realities are here to stay, we will see more news like this one from Columbus (Ohio, USA):

The Dispatch Printing Company has contracted with an Elgin, Ill., graphic-design company to create ads for The Dispatch’s advertising clients, allowing for greater efficiency and more rapid turnaround.

About 90 positions will be eliminated as a result of the contract with Affinity Express Inc. The displaced employees, many of whom will work through next April, will be offered a severance and benefits package, as well as assistance in finding a new job.

Affinity provides similar graphic-design services for numerous other companies, including The Los Angeles Times, Lands’ End, Staples, Advo, Ikon Office Solutions Inc., Xerox Corp. and FedEx Kinko’s Office and Print Service Inc.

Most of the graphic-design work done for those companies is handled by some of Affinity’s 550 employees who work in Pune, India. Advertisements created for The Dispatch will be created there as well.

“This is a step we must take to maintain our vitality amid changes in the media environment,” said Michael F. Curtin, associate publisher and chief operating officer of The Dispatch Printing Company. “We believe this is a cost-effective way for us to improve the quality and speed of service to our advertising customers.”

Affinity will assign a team of artists for Dispatch advertisements. As it does for its other customers, Affinity will staff the Dispatch operation 24 hours a day.

The Guardian´s amazing picture of Robert Altman says all.

You don´t need anything more.

He is gone and from this front page you have the real feeling thast he was almost gone.

What a great picture, what a great front page!

What changes?

The Times Modern?

Oh, my God!

What a shame.

The design still is a bad as it was.

Cosmetic changes for a broadsheet that never felt comfortable in tabloid size.

But the journalists (not the readers, for siure) will be very happy: the new headline typography allows more characters…

David Driver, head of design for The Times, writes: “The Times Modern introduced today allows a better shaped headline with extra characters per line.”
Wounderdul!

The body copy remains Times Classic.

This monumental step ahead has been done gthanks to the almost lack of newspaper experience of Neville Brody, the British designer and art director that is well know in the avant garde magazine design field.
The best: the redrawn insignia in the nameplate.

As you can see (well, perhaps not, and don´t worry, you and I are not in the cosmetic business) the “before and after” is just for the insiders.

I am sorry, but I don´t get it.

If you agree, please joint me and say once again: It´s nude, it´s nude, it´s nude!

elmundo.es is the world leading Spanish speaking news web site but now elpais.com launches a new design that is big, clean, clear and easy to navegate.

The Observer in London includes today some controversial opinions from Will Lewis, the new editor of The Daily Telegraph:

‘If you have not started changing, you’re already dead”

“The idea that it’s enough to generate good newspaper coverage is laughable.”

“Go to other news organisations and they are in a right tizzy, aren’t they? If you aren’t doing this it’s already too late.”

“We are following the reader, and they are moving pretty rapidly into new places. Everyone who’s not started this process – they’re already dead.”

The new socialists candidate for the 2007 presidential elections in France didn’t make it… and Le Figaro, the conservative paper, just wrote words about her victory in yesterday “primaries” of the PSF.

Well, Le Monde did it better.

And almost no US newspaper had the story and the picture in their front pages.

Segolene Royal looks better than Chirac, but, again, many newsrooms were sleeping.

The Detroit Free Press has today a great front page.

A local football legends deserves this unique treatment.

Well done!

The Washington Post used the expected picture.

But I like more the front page of the San Jose Maercury News with some pictures of “the news behind the news.”

Keep in mind that in San Jose lives one of a large group of people from Vietnam.

EXPRESSO from Portugal is the winner of the 2006 European Newspaper Award, as the best designed weekly newspaper of the year.

In 2006 the winners were The Guardian as a daily, and Die Zeit as a weekly.

This year’s best designed national daily newspaper award went to De Morgen (Belgium).

The new EXPRESSO, launched last September, was produced by a team on INNOVATION consultants lead by Carlos Soria, Marta Botero, Eduardo Tessler and Javier Errea.

Javier Errea was the main consultant for the graphic redesign project, working with Henrique Monteiro, editor of EXPRESSO, and the art director, Marco Grieco.

Javier Errea, a senior consultant of INNOVATION has redesigned also EL ECONOMISTA that last week was awarded for the “best front page of the year” at the annual congress of the Spanish Chapter of the Society of News Design (SND).

The new EXPRESSO, that was a broadsheet and now is a full color berliner, was selling around 115.000 copies before these editorial and graphic changes, and ten weeks after the redesign the circulation is up.

The “total re-thinking” of the new EXPRESSO was awarded in a competition with leading newspapers like Le Monde, Le Figaro, The Observer, The Independent, The Guardian, The Observer, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung Sonntag, Die Zeit, Die Welt, The Scotsman, and Politiken.

INNOVATION is working right now in similar projects with the same “total re-thinking” approach in different America, Latin American and European markets.