UPDATE (October 16):
I am in Madrid.
My hotel is in the centric Gran Via.
Three newsstands around 6 PM:
Two or three El Pais, El Mundo and ABC at each of them.
And 20-25 Publicos.
The three vendors agree:
We sell one Publico for each El Pais.
Not very good news for the new national Spanish newspaper.
I don’t know about Publico’s business plan, but …
If this trend is not reversed in a dramatic way, the market has had the last word right now.
Is Publico a dead body?
When I arrived in Barcelona (Spain) on Thursday night, I went to the first newsstand at the airport on my way to get a taxi.
The rack of newspapers was almost empty.
It was 9 pm.
No La Vanguardia.
No El Periodico.
Two Avui.
No El Mundo.
No El Pais.
No ABC.
Three La Razon.
Twenty Publico!
Publico is the new national newspaper launched a few days ago following a massive free-DVD campaign.
So, the “testing” is over.
And if this rack says something, it is that they are printing a lot of copies, but selling very few.
The cover price is just 0.50 euros ($0.70) against the one euro for the competitors.
I asked the newsstand vendor about Publico.
His reaction: “The free paper, you mean?”
Well, it’s not a free paper I said.
“Si, pero parece un gratuito” (Yes, but it looks like a free one)
The comment is quite serious.
This was the same reaction that many readers of El Periodico had after this kind of design a few years ago (too much color, too many boxes, too many short stories…)
El Periodico lost more than 30,000 copies and La Vanguardia has been the clear leading paper in Barcelona since then.
Will Publico be another Pagina 12 of Buenos Aires, Liberation in Paris or The Independent in London?
A viewspaper for a minority?
A non-profit newspaper?
Publico and its young and combative newsroom deserve a better future.
The National Post launched its new design yesterday and today it is paying a high price for a wrong decision with its new vertical name plate.
And the front page picture had to be cropped in order to fit with the aesthetics of the new format…
So, we lost the most dramatic part of the picture of the day: the killing of a photojournalist.
The Toronto Globe and Mail front page shows the whole picture.
The same bad choice was made by the Austrian Kleine Zeitung.
While the Canadian and Austrian papers made a terrible mistake, the International Herald Tribune presented the two photos in full.
Publico, the new Spanish viewspaper, selected another excellent picture.
Reuters has done a superb job covering the demonstrations.
Watch the killing of our colleague in this video from Reuters.
His death deserved a more sensitive news judgement and better photo editing.
What a shame!
