WHAT’S NEXT: INNOVATIONS IN NEWSPAPERS

I am back from Athens.This weekend, the journalists from the new Eleftheros Tipos have moved to a new building near the magnificent Calatrava’s Olympic Games Stadium.When we started to work for this newspaper more than a year ago, the newsroom was not in very good shape.We made a video of the old facilities and the new owners asked us to design not just a new paper but also a new newsroom.During dinner at Mr. and Mrs. Angelopoulos’ house one night, we saw the tentative plans for the new building for the first time.We liked them very much.A few days later, as soon as Mr. and Mrs. A had agreed on our ideas for the new facilities, we asked Saf Fahim, a New York architect, and an INNOVATION partner, to come to Athens and inspect the building.These pictures show the empty floor that was going to be the main newsroom and Saf Fahim checking the ceilings.Well, less than a year later, these new pictures were taken in the same place last Wednesday.Here I am with Javier Errea, INNOVATION’s chief design consultant, outside the new building.And here sitting at the fantastic central Multimedia Super Desk.The first multimedia open-space newsroom in Greece is at full speed.Producing the Best-Designed European Newspaper of the Year.This is another world record thanks to the first-class job done by INNOVATION’s Saf Fahim (the architect also of the original IFRA Newsplex in the USA) and the local team of managers lead by Eleftheros Tipos CEO Mihalis Zacharatos, and a superb team of Greek architects, builders, IT experts and engineers, all of them under the experienced hand in these not easy matters of Mr. Theodore Angelopoulos.Eleftheros Tipos wanted to be more than a print monomedia company.And new multimedia projects will be possible, very soon, thanks to these state-of-the-art facilities.They reflect INNOVATION’s 24/7-multimedia-information-engine concept.Our director and senior consultant, Marta Botero, has to be proud of this newsroom as she was the force behind many of the newsroom management ideas that now are a reality.As a long term project, these new facilities are just the beginning of a revolutionary way to design, produce and spread information for readers, audiences and communities.In a few weeks, we will have the official opening of the new headquarters of Eleftheros Tipos.Today was just the commencement day!