WHAT'S NEXT: INNOVATIONS IN NEWSPAPERS

I asked several INNOVATION consultants which covers they liked the most from the ASME competition. Here are the first choices of Javier Errea, our chief design consultant. Javier’s work with El Economista led to it being named one of SND’s best designed newspapers in the world and his work with Expresso propelled it to the best designed European wekly newspaper of the year in 2006.

A world record!

Javier likes these cover winners from The New Yorker:

Both, he says, are delicate, alegorical and powerful, and at the same time, simple and very smart.

And he also likes the Time magazine cover with the Republican elephant rear.

Monocle’s November issue has a cover story (subscription only) about the future of print media.

Tyler Brule’s magazine selected only a few newspapers.

One of them is Expresso from Portugal, which was also included as a trendy paper in the inaugural issue of the magazine.

In their own words:

“Less text, more information” was the principle behind the 2006 redesign of the Portuguese weekly.

“We wanted to cut the fat out, make it leaner,” explains the editor, Henrique Monteiro.

“We had the professional audience but we wanted to attract younger people.”

Pairing up with Javier Errea from media consultants Innovation, Monteiro made the switch from broadsheet to colour Berliner format.

Mário Feliciano, a Portuguese typographer, delivered fonts inspired by 18th-century Iberian text.

Bullet points, fact boxes and small Q&As now sit next to more white space to help readers digest the big stories.

As a result, 25-34-year-olds have replaced 45-54-year-olds as the core demographic.

Female readers are up from 42 to 48 per cent, while circulation has risen 9 per cent in the past year to 130,000.

(Thanks to Gabriel Sama)

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 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.

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.