WHAT'S NEXT: INNOVATIONS IN NEWSPAPERS

Last week, we saw how some of the “worst offenders” explained the Osama bin Laden story with fictional graphics.

As soon as I started to post some tuitts in my Twitter account @GINER, I saw that many colleagues from many countries reacted in the same way, among them ny friend Alberto Cairo, the infographics editor of EPOCA magazine in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

With Alberto, we wrote “six basic rules” that must be observed to deliver real news with graphics.

Then I contacted Barry Sussman, an INNOVATION Senior Consultant that now serves as editor of the Harvard University Nieman Watchdog Project and he offered that website to post the “check-list” with a short article, and a first list with 58 colleagues from 22 countries immediately endorsed the statement.

Claude Erbsen in New York edited the “six rules” and Barry Sussman in Washington DC edited the full article.

A few minutes ago all this was posted at the Nieman Watchdog website with the same illustration that leads this post, as it fits the purpose and sense of this statement: the front page of the William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal “explaining” the news from Cuba.

And we included a few examples from some of the “worst offenders.”

Like this one from UOL in Brazil:

This from the Daily Mail in the UK:

This one from CBS News:

This one from ABC in Madrid:

This one from the Hindustan Times in India:

This one from NMA News in Taiwan:

Or this from JT France:

You can find an extensive selection with wise comments of Gert K Nielsen about some of the best and worst infographics in his blog VisualJournalism.

But, more important, we just wanted to stress five ideas:

• Facts ,not fiction, is what drives Journalism.
• Visual Journalism is not Show Business.
• Editors must lead this battle against fake information.
• Visual journalists must resist any pressure to deliver graphics “at any cost.”
• And infographics are not a substitute when we don’t have real information.

This what I learned from Alejandro Malofiej, Miguel Urabayen, Peter Sullivan, Mario Tascón, John Grimwade, Chiqui Esteban, Nigel Holmes or Javier Zarracina, and many of the best visual journalists of the world.

And we cannot accept less.

• If you agree with these convictions, please add your signature in the comments section of the Nieman Watchdog, spread the word between your newsrooms, and we will include your names in the next editions of this first wave of endorsements.

The Times of London has today a brilliant and brave leading editorial:

Keeping Shameful Company: Iran has systematically undermined Middle East peace, promoted terrorism and sought a nuclear weapons capability. British businesses have helped it.

And explains:

Iran aims at the annihilation of a member state of the UN. It should not, in any circumstances, have access to overseas capital. Yet when President Clinton sought to impose sweeping sanctions on Iran in the mid-1990s, the UK banks Barclays and Lloyds TSB went to elaborate lengths to enable the Iranians to circumvent them. The most flagrant manoeuvre was to remove references to the identity of Iranian clients in transactions so that US authorities would not be alerted to the transfer of funds from Iran.

Later in pages 38 and 39, The Times tells with more words the story of these dealings.

And as you can see (but not understand), includes an infographic about How they were linked

Well, if you are able to understand this infographic without reading the editorial or the long article, you are my hero.

What a chaos of arrows and lack of clarity!

If the the Malofiej Awards had a category for the worst graphic of the year, this is a serious candidate.

This is the last one.

But you can see the full collection of infographics here.

The team: JONATHAN CORUM, AL GRANBERG, MIKA GRONDAHL, XAQUIN G.V., HAEYOUN PARK and GRAHAM ROBERTS.

The source: BP.

Amazing work!

(Thanks to Michael Agar)

INNOVATION’s Chiqui Esteban is posting in his blog some of the best infos about the Soccer World Cup.

Including his animated ones from lainformacion.com

What a fantastic crop.

Kudos to La Prensa Grafica in El Salvador and Record in Mexico.

Yes, infographics is a latino manía.

They rule in a big way!

Good visual journalist be alert!

How do you believe in these maps when the information is not very good?

Look at the first ones and you will see how unreliable they are.

This will be a great challenge for my infographic friends.

But they will end doing a good job.

You will see.

The BBC has done this basic one:

Anoher version with the same data posted by the European edition of The Wall Street Journal website from the U.K. Met Office with an illustration of the volcanic ash dispersion from the surface to 20,000 feet, issued at 6 a.m. on Thursday.

According to The Times of London the red line on this map of the level of ash shows the exent of debris between surface and 20,000 feet

A late arrival from The New York Times.

And The Telegraph included this picture from a real-time radar image showing all aircraft movements in UK airspace at 9.30am today.

The image from www.radarvirtuel.com shows how ash from the Icelandic volcano stopped all flights in the northern parts of UK.

Here you can see who is flying in Europe… with IUK air space as no-fly-zone.

Lainformacion.com in Spain has a bigger map with more or less the same data.

Lainformacion.com’s logo gets some of the ashes too…

El Pais in Madrid shows the Meteosat 9 images and this the best way to understand the size and impact of the volcanic ashes.

From AFP

And in Twitter going to ashes you can see this incredibly beautiful picture

The BBC offers this fantastic pictures saying:

An image made available by NEODASS/University of Dundee which shows the volcanic ash plume from Iceland, top left, to the north of Britain as received by NASA’s Terra Satellite at 11.39 GMT Thursday April 15, 2010. Photo: NEODAAS/University of Dundee/AP

More, later.

A new great infographic from Column Five Media.

Brilliant!

More amazing pages from i, the new INNOVATION’s revolutionary newspaper of Portugal that excels in how to present and explain the news using the best tools of visual journalism.

Investing in hard news.

With knockout pictures.

Covering Sports with revealing and compelling interviews.

Or just splashing terrific and well edited panoramic pictures.

And small is beautiful, too.

And bold double spread pages that you never saw before.

Yes, nothing new.

Just Journalism.

Period.

The best of the best solutions for any newspaper.

And this is, for me, the biggest lesson learned from the directors and editors of i.

They are the ones that deserve the credit for this display of creativity and courage.

The INNOVATION team was only a provocateur.

They are the ones that at the end of the day implemented our crazy ideas.

Parabens!

This is a selection of some of the best pages of i.

Keep in mind that this is a six month old compact and compelling quality national newspaper of Portugal.

A real “daily-news-magazine” produced by INNOVATION for Sojormedia, with Javier Errea as the leading design consultant in this project.

A new newspaper with an editorial and graphic team of around 80 journalists, working in an “state-of-the-art” multimedia newsroom designed by INNOVATION’s partners Calau&Riera, a media architects studio based in Barcelona.

Enjoy this display of creativity, good journalism and innovation.

With colors.

Smart words.

Amazing pictures.

Outstading illustrations.

Fabulous infographics.

And new ways to present and explain the news.

Journalism Caviar!

With brilliant graphic story-telling.

With a great mix of different visual languages.

Redescovering the powerful tool of photo-essays.

Investing in illustrators and giving them full freedom.

Or using black and white pictures in a fantastic way.

More pages of i, later.

INNOVATION’s Pablo Ramírez is working this week in LIBERATION with their graphics team.

Today the newspaper has this double spread that presents in a very visual way the results of an European survey.

This is great stuff, simple icons but rich information and good use of the word clouds.

Yesterday they had another excellent visual double spread.

Well done!