WHAT'S NEXT: INNOVATIONS IN NEWSPAPERS

Le Tour de France started in London in a big way.

Like Il Giro in Italy, Le Tour de France is a fabulous “brand extension” from newspapers!

Conrad Black goes to jail.

The Daily Telegraph fails to recognize that he saved the paper and The Spectator.

He is not another Robert Maxwell, but has been presented like him.

Wrong.

They were crooks, but at least Lord Black improved his papers.

Journalists must accept the fact.

News Corporation and Dow Jones agree about the sale.

The Bancroft family wanted another buyer but nobody, nobody, offered more than Murdoch.

So, they will sell.

The New York Times is in its new building.

But the financial results are worse than ever.

The Sulzberger family and their (poor) business managers must be accountable for the failure.

The Apple iPhone is a success.

Apple and AT&T sold more than one million sets in the first week.

They could sell more than 10 million sets before the end of the year.

The new Independent on Sunday is doing better than the critics expected.

Well, we were almost alone when all the bloggers were negative.

The new, compact, Sunday news magazine works.

The new ET in Greece confirms its success.

Again, against the conventional view.

INNOVATION was right.

And the ET team did a super job!

A great front page and picture in today’s Eleftheros Tipos.

The first Greek daily news magazine is doing a superb job.

INNOVATION Consultant Michael Agar writes me this message from London, about an interesting comment from Peter Wilby in The Guardian under the headline Should Sundays be put out to grass?

When dailies are integrating their print and web operations into a seamless 24-hour whole, it is hard to see why the Sundays should remain inviolate – their combined circulations have fallen by 50%, nearly twice the rate of the dailies’ decline.

As the traditional British Sunday gradually disappeared, and the Saturday papers started multi-section packages of their own, they struggled to find a role.

In response, the upmarket Sundays in particular have constantly reinvented themselves, starting new sections, changing typefaces, switching editors.

Las Sunday, the Telegraph – which recently had three different editors in a year – appeared with a new typography and layout and a redrawn masthead.

A week earlier, the Independent on Sunday – on its eighth editor since it launched 17 years ago – had a more comprehensive makeover, under the slogan: “Everything you need on a Sunday, nothing you don’t.”

The condrum for Sunday press is that nothing much happens on a Saturday, bar football and most sport.

Most news stories are over-hyped and branded as extensive analysis.

Of the ‘quality’ market two of the Sunday newspapers are broadsheet and offer their readership more words than can be read on what is now one of the busiest days of the week for most families.

ABC figures show the Sunday Times is down -7.48% year on year, while the Sunday Telegraph at -3.14%.

The Berliner format Observer while offering readers medium length reads to full length and an attractive package is down -7.09%

Although the Independent on Sunday is also down -4.04% year on year it offers the reader what it says on the tin “Everything you need on a Sunday and nothing you don’t.”

Yet for all its faults, the IoS may prove ahead of the game, just as the daily Independent was in going tabloid.

The new format may not raise longterm circulation.

But it helps the paper live within its means and other Sunday papers will eventually face the same challenge.

You are right.

Sunday newspapers need to be reinvented.

And The Independent on Sunday is a bold move.

Our own experience with the new Sunday Eleftheros Tipos in Greece is another example with a massive increase in circulation.

In just the first three weeks, ET-K now sells more than three times the number of copies sold before INNOVATION’s changes.

ET-K, the new Sunday edition of Eleftheros Tipos, is a big success.

This is the third issue since the launch and the circulation has been growing every week.

The last Sunday before INNOVATION’s changes, ET sold less than 46,000 copies.

The first Sunday after the new formula, ET-K sold almost 106,000 copies.

The second Sunday after the changes, the new ET-K sold more than 115,000 copies.

And today’s front page is going to make the difference on Greek newsstands again.

The Sunday package also includes ET Weekly, an excellent Sunday Magazine, and Review, a new Sunday supplement.

Some excellent pages from today’s edition.

A great front page.

The new ET is getting better and better reactions from readers and advertisers.

The circulation is up.

The advertising is up.

After many years of decline, ET is becoming a leading player again.

The Greek market needed a new kind of newspaper.

Different.

Compelling.

Attractive.

Well-designed.

And well-printed.

The newsroom of Eleftheros Tipos is doing a first-class job.

Congratulations!

See all the pages in their pdfViewer.

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.

Here you can see the old Eleftheros Tipos, that changed its editorial and graphic model to become the first Greek daily news magazine today.

An education issue as the first coverstory.

Click on today’s front page and you will get a bigger view.

Watch a slideshow (3:29) with prototypes of the new Eleftheros Tipos here.

The INNOVATION editorial and graphic redesign of the Greek paper will launch this Wednesday.

You can see the different sections, supplements and magazines of the paper.

The design project was produced by Javier Errea and Pablo Errea, INNOVATION consultants, and the implementation is being done by Javier with the help and talent of the design team of the paper lead by Spiros Polikandriotis.

The pictures show a prototype of a front and cover story for the ET2 section.

More pages to come.