WHAT'S NEXT: INNOVATIONS IN NEWSPAPERS

The founder of Le Monde, the venerable Hubert Beuve-Mery didn’t like long meetings and he favored news meetings in his office “a la Japanese” with all the editors standing up.

A good way to keep them short and not boring.

Well, The Guardian in London is better  and more funky with these yellow sofas.

Send me please more pictures of real news meeting rooms, and traditions.

This Guardian infographic is a waste of time.

Who cares about the river, motorway or railway next to this school in Finland?

Too much irrelevant information is another form of info decoration.

(Thanks to Chiqui Esteban)

Roy Greenslade is right in his blog from The Guardian:

Kenji Nagai, the photographer killed in Burma holds his camera willing to continue taking pictures… of his killer.

What a dramatic lesson for any journalist!

This was Kenji Nagai, a 50-year-old photojournalist killed working for the Tokyo-based APF News who, The Guardian said, had years of experience covering danger zones.

Kenji was fatally wounded in Yangon on Thursday, and pictures smuggled out of the country showed him clutching a camera as he lay dying.

You can follow the Burma revolt in this amazing blog.

And in the videos posted on YouTube.

The Committee to Protect Journalists strongly condemns the shootings and the heavy government interference and ongoing harassment of journalists who are attempting to cover the unfolding political events in Burma.

“The protests in Burma are of international concern, and we call on the military government to allow journalists to report freely and without fear of reprisal on these major events,” said Joel Simon, CPJ’s executive director. “Judging by the widespread news and video clips of recent events, we fear that the junta will resort to even greater violence as the situation in Burma grows worse.”

According to the Burma Media Association (BMA) and Burmese exile-run news sources, on Wednesday afternoon at the height of the conflict the military government disconnected nearly all mobile phone services in Rangoon.

The cuts took place at 3 p.m., coinciding with the time when security forces confronted and opened fire on Buddhist monk demonstrators at Sule Pagoda in central Rangoon.

Authorities also reportedly moved to block the Internet, over which journalists have sent news, images, and videos of the protests to outside news agencies and foreign-hosted video-sharing Web sites since the unrest began on August 19.

According to BMA, in recent days police have moved to close several Internet cafes in Rangoon.

Meanwhile the main state-affiliated Internet service provider, Bagan Cybertech, has, on government orders, agreed to reduce Internet speeds, an apparent attempt to limit the ability of journalists to send out video images of the protests, according to BMA.

CPJ research has found that many Burmese journalists inside the country were able to use proxy servers and proxy sites to get around government-administered blocks on foreign-based e-mail accounts, including Gmail, which they have used to anonymously send out news to foreign and exile-run news organizations.

Several journalists were able to send out images and videos of the protests as well as footage of the government’s crackdown on demonstrators over the Internet, according to news groups who received the materials.

Burmese authorities have refused to grant reporting visas to scores of journalists who have applied in recent weeks from Thailand.

(Pictures by Reuters)

The first decision will have this headline:

WSJ Stops Charging for Access to Its Web Site.

Any doubt?

No.

So, the Financial Times is next.

As Jeff Jarvis says in a terrific post:

It’s the relationship that is valuable.

It’s the relationship that is profitable, not the control of the content or the distribution.

That is the essential media moral of the internet story.

It has taken 13 years of internet history for media companies to learn that, to give up the idea that they control something scarce they can charge consumers for, but they’ve finally learned it.

That is the lesson of the death of TimesSelect.

Jeff also tells this great story:

I remember Alan Rusbridger, editor of the Guardian, giving a speech in which he ridiculed the revenue TimesSelect brought in.

In his beloved PowerPoint, Rusbridger showed a picture of the new Times headquarters and said that the revenue from TimesSelect wouldn’t even pay the gas bill for the place.

(Illustration by Vince Natale/NYT)

Great pictures on the front pages of British newspapers.

And many readers sending a lot of pictures to their Web sites.

See here, here and here.

The Guardian has the same picture of the Cathedral city but presented in a dramatic two-page spread.

A poster that will be a must for many local people!

Click on the picture and you will see it bigger.

Last week, Time Warner Chairman-CEO Richard D. Parsons, who told a media conference audience in London:

“I’m going to say something I shouldn’t say.

I worry about CNN more now than I do about CNN.com.”

Well…

Let me say in the same way that:

I worry about The New York Times more now than I do about nytimes.com

I worry about The Guardian more now than I do about guardia.co.uk

I worry about El Pais more now than I do about elpais.es

I worry about The Asahi Shimbun more now than I do about asahi.com

I worry about USA Today more now than I do about usatoday.com

I worry about La Repubblica more now than I do about repubblica.it

I worry about The Wall Street Journal more now than I do about online.wsj.com

I worry about Clarin more now than I do about clarin.com

I worry about Die Welt more now than I do about welt.de

I worry about El Mundo more now than I do about elmundo.es

I worry about The Sidney Morning Herald more now than I do about smh.com.au

I worry about Reforma more now than I do about reforma.com

I worry about the Financial Times more now than I do about ft.com

I worry about O Globo more now than I do about oglobo.globo.com

I worry about Le Figaro more now than I do about lefigaro.fr

I worry about El Mercurio more now than I do about emol.com

I worry about Il Corriere della Sera more now than I do about corriere.it

I worry about El Tiempo more now than I do about eltiempo.com

I worry about the Dagens Nyheter more now than I do about dn.se

I worry about the South China Morning Post more now than I do about scmp.com

I worry about Zero Hora more now than I do about clicrbs.com.br

I worry about the Kleine Zeitung more now than I do about kleinezeitung.at

I worry about The Globe and Mail more now than I do about theglobeandmail.com

I worry about El Nuevo Dia more now than I do about endi.com

I worry about Argumenti i Fakti more now than I do about aif.ru

I worry about Helsingin Sanomat more now than I do about hs.fi

I worry about Segodnya more now than I do about segodnya.au

I worry about 24 Heures more now than I do about 24heures.ch

I worry about Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung more now than I do about faz.net

I worry about Gazeta Wyborcza more now than I do about gazetawyborcza.pl

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.

If you have any doubt about how newspaper design is better than ever today …

Watch this slideshow about the 50,000 issues of The Guardian in 50 pages.

While The Independent played the typography card today, The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph played the big picture one.

In both cases, good pictures, good cropping and good front page design.