WHAT'S NEXT: INNOVATIONS IN NEWSPAPERS

Jeff Jarvis has been in Germany consulting for Burda and he is very impressed by the quality of their young interns:

I’ve been told that the secret to MTV’s success is that it is reallly run by its interns.

Having interns and giving them the respect to both train them and listen to them is vital today for the obvious reason:

They understand the future better than the rest of us.

More than that, they are the future.

Reading Tina Brown’s latest book (The Diana Chronicles) during the last few days, she is described with this first line:

Tina Brown was twenty-five when she became editor-in-chief of The Tatler, reviving the nearly defunct 270 year sold magazine.

Well… our president, Carlos Soria, became the youngest media CEO in Spain when he was less than 26 year old, and since then he always tells us:

“Let’s always give great challenges and opportunities to young people, as soon as possible.”

INNOVATION has today a new generation of young consultants like Guillermo Nagore in New York, Carlo Campos, Jose Antonio Ferris, Ismael Nafria, Pablo Ramirez, Pablo Errea, Jorge Heili, and Daniel Lozano in Madrid, Gabriel Sama in San Antonio, Sophie Bougneres in France, Chiqui Esteban in Cadiz, Denny Brack in Washington D.C., Eduardo Tessler in Brazil, Christian Oliver in Atlanta, Javier Errea in Pamplona, David LaFontaine and Janine Warner in Los Angeles, Felipe Lamus in Chapel Hill, or Al Trivino, Michael Agar, Robin Gould, Guy Smith, Rob Beynon, and Juan Senor in London who are good examples of this policy of hiring the best of the best.

They are the future of INNOVATION.

INNOVATION consultants Chiqui Esteban and Pablo Ramirez have been working for the last few weeks with the Eleftheros Tipos’ six infographic journalists lead by Kali Labrou.

There are pages with the new infographics posted in Chiqui’s blog.

For the first time, visual journalism becomes a serious business in the Greek press.

Readers and competitors have reacted with surprise.

Nobody expected a change of this proportion.

But a depressed newspaper market like the Greek one needed this big gamble.

All this has been done in less than nine months with a newsroom that understood very quickly that this was not going to be a cosmetic change.

The INNOVATION team spent weeks and weeks in hands-on training for the implimentation of three manuals: editorial, newsroom management and graphic — which included a full design style book and a specific infographics style model.

Michael Fairhead, our production consultant, and former News International production director in Wapping, London, did the fine-tuning of the new full-color presses that print the new ET.

With an extra quality newsprint paper, Eleftheros Tipos has been able to reproduce these graphics with almost magazine quality.

Now wait for the new weekend suplements and magazines.

Tomorrow you will see the first one.