WHAT'S NEXT: INNOVATIONS IN NEWSPAPERS

Tomorrow, the leading newspaper of Funchal (Madeira), Diario de Noticias, launches its new editorial and graphic formula.

The Blandy family, which also produces some of Madeira’s best wines, and ControlInveste Media run this newspaper with style, passion and strong community-oriented news policies.

During the last nine months, a team of INNOVATION consultants (Carlos Soria, Guillermo Nagore, Eduardo Tessler, Ricardo Chaves, Decio Trujilo and Marta Botero) have been working on these changes under the leadership of Diario de Noticias president Michael Blandy and general manager Jose Bettencourt da Camara.

Dramatic and innovative changes for a regional newspaper.

Diario de Noticias is a striking case that shows how a quality, independent, regional newspaper can have one of the highest penetration rates of the Portuguese press.

Today I will show you today some of our prototypes, and tomorrow you will see the first real pages.

Guillermo Nagore, our New York-based design consultant, has been the force behind many of these new graphic concepts.

Next week in Boston (USA), El Economista and Expresso will get several world design awards.

And today, the judges of the ÑHO4, the annual competition for the best newspaper design in Spain and Portugal, announced that El Economista and Expresso have won many new awards.

El Economista is the best-designed Spanish newspaper of the year for the 20,000-50,000 copies category, and Expresso is the best redesign of the year in Spain and Portugal.

El Economista is a new national financial newspaper published in Madrid by Alfonso de Salas, the founding CEO of El Mundo.

Expresso is the leading quality national weekend newspaper of Portugal, founded by Francisco Pinto Balsemao.

(Before)

(After)

These two newspapers from Madrid and Lisbon are INNOVATION clients, and Javier Errea, our chief design consultant, was the leading force behind the graphic projects.

Javier Errea, after the highly successful redesign of Eleftheros Typos in Athens (Greece) and Capital in Sofia (Bulgaria), is now working on several new projects: Diario de Navarra in Pamplona (Spain), Al Bayan in Dubai (UAE), and El Heraldo in Barranquilla (Colombia).

Javier is a journalist who has been a reporter, editor, designer and now another worlwide-award-winning INNOVATION consultant.

This is today’s front page of Diario de Noticias, the leading paper of Funchal, Madeira, Portugal.

INNOVATION has been working for more than a year with the local team of directors and editors of this newspaper and next week, Diario de Noticias will present its new editorial and graphic design.

Guillermo Nagore (New York) is the INNOVATION consultant behind the graphic change.

Carlos Soria (Spain), Eduardo Tessler (Brazil) and Marta Botero (Colombia) developed the new editorial and newsroom managent models.

You will see here in a few days the new and improved Diario de Noticias, a family-owned newspaper celebrating 130 years.

This is the last issue of La Vanguardia in its traditional berliner format and old design.

Tomorrow, La Vanguardia, the leading quality family-owned newspaper of Barcelona (Catalonia, Spain), will launch its new format.

Today, La Vanguardia has a supplement that tracks the graphic changes of the paper in its 126 years.

La Vanguardia will use two new and fast Wifag Evolution 371 full color printing presses.

The promotional campaign is simple and direct:

“La Vanguardia no cambia” or “La Vanguardia doesn’t change”

The message is clear:

The Spanish newspaper introduces editorial and graphic changes but the “soul” of the paper remains.

This is not a newspaper in crisis.

Or trying to find a new niche.

La Vanguardia will have the same tabloid format of El Pais, and the same format that it has had for its national and international editions for many years.

Javier de Godo, publisher and president of the paper was the force behind the dramatic and very successful changes made on October 2, 1989.

Then, Walter Bernard and Milton Glaser redesigned La Vanguardia in a big and original way and the paper started to print the new format with another Wifag.

The nameplate was changed.

A new editorial formula was launched and La Vanguardia got new young readers and more ads than ever.

Tomorrow’s changes are less dramatic, but, like in 1989, they have been seriously discussed for more than two years.

The new graphic and editorial formula has been developed as an “in-house” project lead by the publisher, Javier de Godo, and the editors Jose Antich and Alfredo Abian.

During this process, INNOVATION acted as a facilitator for the internal discussion.

The INNOVATION team included Carlos Soria (Spain), Juan Antonio Giner (USA), Juan Senor (UK), Claude Erbsen (USA), Thomaz Souto Correa (Brazil), Javier Errea (Spain), Javier Zarracina (USA), and Marta Torres (Spain).

We selected and presented the most relevant international media trends, audited the newspaper, reviewed its newsroom management and suggested many changes that at the end of this process were included in a final report to the directors and editors of La Vanguardia.

After our report was issued, the graphic changes were produced by the design department of La Vanguardia, lead by Carlos Perez de Rozas, Rosa Mundet and Jose Alberola, and the help of Pablo Martin and Jaime Serra.

They have done a superb job.

It has been a longterm project.

And an example of team work.

A content-driven redesign.

Today, the editor of the paper, Jose Antich, explains in its daily bulletin (“Looking to the Future”) how La Vanguardia will change tomorrow, but keeping its soul and, what’s more important, offering a better product than ever.

Jesus de Polanco died Saturday at the age of 77.

Polanco, the billionaire chairman of the Spanish media conglomerate Grupo PRISA, co-founded El Pais and founded Grupo PRISA, which also owns radio and TV stations and publishing companies.

Grupo PRISA is the largest media company in the Spanish-speaking world.

El Pais, launched in 1976, following Franco’s 1975 death, became Spain’s most-read newspaper as the country returned to democracy.

It remains its top-selling daily.

He was the most powerful newspaper publisher in Spain.

I met him twice in my life:

The first time in Barcelona during an international seminar organized by INNOVATION.

It was in the early 90′s, and he was reluctant to accept that newspapers needed to be full-color products.

The second time in Madrid in his office at the Santillana Foundation near the Ritz hotel.

I went to see him with my friend Jayme Sirotsky, the first Latin American president of the World Association of Newspapers (WAN)

We had a very long conversation.

During these two hours, alone with Mr. Polanco, I found that:

1. He loved books. He was literally surrounded by bookshelfs.

2. He loved Latin America. He knew very well who was who in Latin America.

INNOVATION was the first company hired by PRISA to do editorial consulting for the Group.

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.

If you understand Portuguese, watch this video clip of Rodrigo Lara Mesquita, one the new media visionaires of this world.

Rodrigo is also one of our best friends.

He and his family, owners of O Estado de S. Paulo in Brazil, were the first clients of INNOVATION.

Born in São Paulo, he is a journalist who studied in the École des Hautes Études (Paris, France), and was the director of Agência Estado (AE).

A former president of the Fundação SOS Mata Atlântica, he now is the driving force behind RadiumSystems-Peabirus, and the Brazilian representative of Nicholas Negroponte’s One Laptop Per Child project.

Watch this exclusive video produced by the INNOVATION International Media Consulting Group in London and presented by Juan Senor, INNOVATION’s UK Director, at the World Newspaper Congress in Cape Town, South Africa.

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Percent of global Internet users who visited this site. Average in the last 3 months.

Change: up 14%

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Change: up 77,657

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Change: up 40%

Thank you for reading.

During the presentations being made this week at the Mid-Year Media Review in New York, the statement by Reid Ashe, Media General’s CEO, sums up best what they all seem to be saying:

“The Internet is no longer an add-on. For many applications such as breaking news or, increasingly, classified advertising, it’s now our primary medium.”

Media General owns three metropolitan newspapers, 22 daily community newspapers, and more than 150 weekly newspapers and other publications, plus 23 network-affiliated television stations.

It operates 75 online enterprises aligned with those newspaper and television outlets.

I was with their top editors in Richmond, Virginia, a few months ago.

Yes, this is a big strategic shift.

As INNOVATION says all the time:

From readers to audiences.

From audiences to communities.

“At the core of our strategy is the goal of increasing our total audience in all markets.

“We are achieving this by creating a strong Internet presence, by introducing new products and services, and by continually enhancing our newspapers and television stations,” said Marshall N. Morton.

And why such attention on the Internet?

Morton is looking for $40 million in online revenues this year, growing to $50 million next year.

“Going forward, we are focusing increasingly on display and rich media ads from local and national advertisers.

“These categories have grown 65% and 104% respectively, in 2007,” Morton said at the New York meeting.

So… traditional media know that there is no other option: the digital multimedia transition is the only way.

(Thanks to Claude Erbsen in New York)