WHAT'S NEXT: INNOVATIONS IN NEWSPAPERS

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 cartoon is not funny.

Published today by The Times of London in a column explaining why the British paper has decided to make again T2 as a separate section.

Perfect:

Hard news and main section for the lord of the house.

Soft news in the trashy T2 section for the lady of the house.

A macho and ghetto approach that explains why many editors and publisher don’t get it.

Go to the streets.

Go the offices.

Go to the stadiums.

Go to the universities.

…or just look inside your own newsrooms.

Women and men sharing the same spaces, jobs, sports, education and interests.

But our macho newspapers don’t get it.

So good luck if you alienate 50% of your potential readers!

This cartoon is a perfect example of a reality that doesn’t exist anymore.

Breakfast together?

Reading the newspaper?

The only real thing is that the readers of these macho newspapers are as old as the people shown in the cartoon.

And, you know?, they will die with them.

The quite man.

A first class coach keeping always a low profile.

Doing his job.

Not acting.

Not playing for the cameras.

The anti-Maradonna.

The anti-Mourihno.

Loved by his team.

Another great soccer coach in the same tradition of Barcelona’s Pep Guardiola.

A happy, happy man.

The Times of London reports about Vicente del Bosque comments after yesterday’s victory:

“Vicente Del Bosque, the Spain coach, refused to criticise either Webb or Holland, preferring to focus on his team’s feat in winning the World Cup two years after the European Championship.

“I’m here to speak about the beautiful things in football,” Del Bosque said.

“Holland played a good game. It was very intense, balanced and even. It was rough at times, but that’s part of football.

This final had quality football, offensive football, attacking football. Football is moving forward and, in this World Cup in South Africa, which has been an extraordinary success for this continent, the reward today was for beautiful football.”

Un Caballero Español”

A British gentleman!

The upcoming memoirs of Lord Mandelson, The Third Man, are a big event here in the UK.

And The Limes of London is playing big too with a great coverage that includes this double spread with a great illustration.

Rupert Murdoch is following the successful LIFE formula of Henry Luce: serializing great books sell magazines… and newspapers.

The print edition is a must-read but what it’s more important is the extra-work done on the website and iPad with videos, graphics and more information that Murdoch wants you to pay for.

I just went to my local Press Agent and asked about today’s papers sales, and my newspaper guru said:

The Times? Sold out in one hour!

Well done!

Good advice from TESCO’s CEO, Sir Terry Leahy in The Times of London:

“The eureka moment for us when we stopped seeing ourselves as a purveyor of baked beans and as a servant of a customer.

And you realise that baked beans don’t change very much but customers change enormously and they take you unto amazing areas”.

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.

Terrific story by Katherine Griffiths in today’s Times of London.

Senior bankers in the eye of Britain’s biggest financial crisis, exactly a year ago, have admitted for the first time that the system died and had to be shocked back to life. “I’m not sure if people appreciate how close we came to not being able to get money out of bank machines,” one said.

It’s like a triller.

This will be a bestselling book.

Brilliant journalism!

A brilliant way to explain the nuclear arms race.

Show, don’t tell at its best!

(Thanks to INNOVATION’s Michael Agar)

One topic for the front page of The Times of London.

A tabloid more than ever.

With a great picture.