Good news!
This is the front page of today’s Publico.
Spain has the first printed, paid, quality, daily views-paper.
The editor, Ignacio Escolar, is a young journalist (31 years old), who is one of the most popular bloggers in the country.
He is the son of Arsenio Escolar, editor of 20 Minutos, the popular quality free newspaper that leads the Spanish market with more readers and copies than any other newspaper.
As Rodrigo Orihuela says:
“Ignacio Escolar, is likely to set an international milestone: the world’s first blogger to become editor-in-chief of a national newspaper… The financial group behind the newspaper, Mediapro, is close to the socialist administration of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, the Spanish Prime Minister, and wants to jump into the fray as soon as possible in order to be well-placed as the political campaign heats up ahead of national elections in March 2008.”
Público has been presented also as a fresh alternative to El Pais, but the first issue shows that it wants to get new young readers.
Not to steal readers from other newspapers, but to bring in new ones.
This is the right approach.
Público is a full-color, compact, quality and cheap newspaper (only .50 euros at the newstand) following traditional design concepts from El Periodico de Catalunya in Barcelona, Clarín in Buenos Aires or The Independent in London.
At the same time, the Planeta Group is launching adn.es, another “daily,” but online, lead by Juan Varela, another popular blogger.
The Spanish newspaper market is booming, El Pais, El Mundo and La Vanguardia are ready to launch new editorial and graphic concepts.
El Pais has been working with Ally Palmer and Terry Watson but the redesign changes, as in the past with a Lucy Lacava project, have been rejected by the editors.
Now they are working on another in-house redesign.
For this reason, the relaunch of El Pais is going to be in October, rather than September.
El Mundo will present also a new face in print, and needs to rethink in a dramatic way its online version, which now has been clearly challenged by elpais.es.
The former editor of elmundo.es, Gumersindo de la Fuente, is working on another “online only” news service, and there are similar projects in the pipeline for other newspaper groups.
The Spanish media was shocked when a few weeks ago Juan Luis Cebrian, former editor of El Pais, said that if he had to found El Pais again, he would start it with an online version.
Finally, La Vanguardia in Barcelona, leader of the Catalonian market, is launching an updated editorial model with new format and a state of the art Wifag full color on October 2.
INNOVATION has been working with La Vanguardia on this project.
Público is a show of faith in the power of print media but, more importantly, in the power of ideas and journalism.
As I said, good news!
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