Posts filed under 'Newspapers'
1/ Twenty years after the launch of internet computing, a period during which global web traffic has grown at an average of 425% a year, on a planet with over one billion active personal computers and over four billion mobile phones and in which the quantity of information stored is due to double every five years by 2011, there are in fact more newspapers and magazines than ever before. Print is the world’s largest advertising medium, over the past five years global circulation of newspapers and magazines has risen not fallen, consumer spending on magazines has increased 48% in the past ten years, and on average one in 12 people on the planet buys a newspaper every day and one in three reads one — compared to one in four who have access to the internet.
2/ The widely accepted ‘replacement’ view of disruptive technology is a myth. From the earliest fertility rites to Jung’s death and resurrection archetypes, humanity seems to have derived a powerful tendency to link the new with the death of the old. In fact disruptive technologies are much more likely to co-exist with incumbent technologies than kill them. In 2008, Chintan Vaishnav of MIT published a study of innovations including organic LED, nano chips, open source software, online books, the Segway scooter, online shopping, YouTube and advertising on social networks. The more he analysed what was going on, the more he found that innovators were invigorating the incumbents. How else would there now be over 20,000 brands of beer?
3/ Even when technologies are displaced (as per cassette tapes, film, crossbows and typewriters) humanity’s appetite for experience only ever grows. The Greeks thought writing would kill memory yet, far from killing memory, books have given us a whole lot more to remember. Marshall McLuhan reckoned that images would overpower words yet it has turned out that both visual and alphabetic cultures have flourished. It was assumed at various times that photography would replace painting, that recorded music would replace live performance, that film would replace theatre, that video would replace the cinema. But the experiences are different enough to survive alongside one another.
4/ Pixel and print are different experiences. Contemporary psychological research on reading is now endorsing common intuition. In her 2008 book Proust and the Squid, Maryanne Wolf, a professor of child development, argues that while on screen we skim and cherry-pick, in print we read “inferentially, analytically and critically”. Anne Mangen of Stavanger University in Norway, goes further. She has found that the paraphernalia of digital reading psychologically stops the brain creating its own virtual world, in the way that it does when absorbed in the physical page.
5/ Information overload is deeply corrosive. The problem, as Clay Shirky has said, is “filter failure”. The cost of digitial publishing is so low that anyone can do it. People have become their own filters, leading not only to anxiety about information gathering and interpretation but also to increasingly solipsistic states of ignorance about common bodies of knowledge. Print is a natural filter.
6/ In a world of frequently changing affiliations and relationships, in which the philosopher Charles Taylor describes “the loss of substance, the increasing thinness of ties and shallowness of the things we use,” political and community life is faltering. Print has historically been a major source of identity and an driver of civic engagement. Even reading a paper can be a political act. The Financial Times says a lot more about you than the lid of a Dell laptop.
7/ Print is already reinventing itself and flourishing in new ways. Here are some interesting examples:
- i, the new daily news-magazine designed by Innovation. (Lisbon)
- Niiu, a newspaper individually tailored to a subscriber from selections of their favourite correspondents and then delivered in print to the door. (Berlin)
- Vendredi, a Friday magazine collated from the editors’ selection of the best they can find on the internet, much of it suggested by readers. (Paris)
- Free Style Magazine, a 200 page art, fashion and lifestyle magazine designed in the shape of frisbee. (London)
- the Blogpaper, a user-generated newspaper in which the articles are written, edited and selected by bloggers. (London)
Prediction: In ten years there will be more digital media, delivered in ways that we cannot yet imagine to devices that have not yet been dreamed of. There will also be more variety and choice of print media than there is today.
April 30th, 2010
First, that the Indy is very fortunate. To have a proprietor with deep pockets is the key requirement for a modern newspaper and in Alexander Lebedev the Indy has found its man. To have a proprietor with deep pockets, a record of supporting a free press, a good management team, a love of print and an adventurous spirit is almost too good to be true.
Second, on the anatomy of the deal, clearly Mr L has picked up a fine British title for a nominal sum. However he has also taken on heavy liabilities, somewhere in the region of £1m per month, which is roughly the rate of the Indy’s losses. The extent of those liabilities is what took up so many months of negotiation. Among the heaviest is the print deal with Trinity Mirror where the Indy has a long term commitment. It seems that Lebedev has managed to cut that back to five years. There will also have been negotiations with Associated Newspapers about office and back-office costs.
The deal itself is a remarkable achievement: complex, riddled with competing interests and a tangle of overlapping contractual commitments. As far as one can gather, the people who pulled it off are Lebedev’s deputy chairman at the Standard, Justin Byam-Shaw, assisted by Andy Ritchie; the Indy’s finance director Andrew Round, ANL’s operations chief Ian Hanson and Trinity Mirror’s print director Rupert Middleton. Hats off to them.
Third, what will Lebedev do with his new baby? The answer is probably nothing; at least not in a hurry. If the key to saving £1m a month was simple, he’d do it fast, but it isn’t simple. The Independent will carry on under the MD Simon Kelner, ably edited by the great Roger Alton. Why change anything much until you are sure about the right thing to do?
Longer-term, my guess is that the Lebedev team will look at two options: (i) even more of a daily “viewspaper” than it is already edited by some high profile national figure and priced fairly high - a daily Spectator if you will. Or (ii) a morning free title to run alongside its sister paper, the Evening Standard.
My own preference would be the latter. For several years I’ve been advocating an upmarket national free title for the UK, alongside Metro which does a fine job in the middle market. Newspapers in Western countries are no longer a place where investors will make fortunes. But if you happen to own a newspaper anyway, the least worst option today is to have a huge print readership combined with some highly lucrative, digital spin-offs.
The way to have huge print readership is to take advantage of every cost-saving piece of technology that you can lay your hands on … and go free. Ad rates for free papers are now established and produce around ten times the yield of a digital ad (and always will). In Britain the evidence is that decent, well-run free papers can make money. Metro already does quite handsomely, The Standard is doing remarkably well as a free paper - moving towards profit after many years of stonking losses - and City AM is also an unsung achievement, breaking even most months of the year. The advertising industry has taken a huge battering and is in transformational turmoil - but it will come back and some of it will come back in print. If the Indy - or some version of it - were free, it might be able to claim the highest readership of any quality paper in Britain, claiming number one spot in its market sector instead of the wooden spoon. The fact that the other qualities have killed off bulks and pushed prices up can only help.
Editorially it would be huge challenge: what would a free Indy be like? One can imagine it perhaps quite a bit shorter, combining a lucid, crisp overview of serious news combined with a few carefully-chosen but world-class features every day. Unfashionably, the research we have done at my little agency shows that this is the sort of thing young people want. It is the hot-hosue media execs in the their early middle ages who are so enthusiastic about user generated content, crowd-sourcing, networked content and the rest of it. Younger readers (who will of course decide the future) are far keener on something carefully filtered and edited and something that will begin to make sense of the global madness around them. Admittedly they don’t specify this must be delivered in print; and in the end everything will be digital anyway. But they aren’t against print either - if you could read something half decent in print - and, for now, print makes more commercial sense.
As for the highly lucrative digital spin offs, here is the news from the wilder shores of innovation where I spend much of my time: Rupert Murdoch may be right that people should pay for journalism but he’s wrong about what sort of journalism they’ll pay for. They won’t pay for the kind of news and features that appear in his popular papers. Why bother? Read the free bbc.co.uk or the free guardian.co.uk instead. What they will pay for are digital services that are radically different and exciting: a personal live briefing from a journalist for example; the opportunity to ask questions; inside knowledge that isn’t vouchsafed to your competitors; consumer advice.
And forget the web. All this must be on mobile phones.
March 25th, 2010
Projects completed this spring and summer include:
Al Watan Relaunch
Saudi Arabia’s first national daily newspaper, Al Watan, was launched seven years ago by Khalid Al Faisal, Governor of the Mecca province and a leading member of the reformist wing of the Saudi royal family. Controversial and innovative, It made a huge splash at the time. A contemporary relaunch was commissioned in order to recapture some of the excitement and success of those early years. The guidance was to make the newspaper sharp and modern, somewhat like the Guardian. The senior team wanted the whole works: better use of colour, a new masthead, new customised fonts, better architecture, a reinvented front page, better use of graphics, better display for advertising and high impact on the sales racks. The fact that the paper is published in Arabic posed an extra challenge. Ryan’s design work was very favourably received and has been credited with returning Al Watan to the forefront of Saudi papers. The editor of a competitor newspaper, Okaz, wrote: “You took the Saudi press 10 years forward. I cannot do what you have done. It is a turning point in the history of the Arab press”.
Keighley News Redesign
Our redesign of the 147-year old Keighley News was unveiled to a (doubtless, sceptical) West Yorkshire readership. Editor Malcolm Hoddy and Newsquest group editor Perry Austin-Clarke, had asked for a thorough modernisation of the weekly tabloid – but one that didn’t scare off loyal readers. The end result was, in the words of Mr Austin-Clarke “ a fresher, brighter, better-organised product” ; and the latest circulation figures show a sales lift of between 3% and 3.5%.
Gulf Times Redesign
A year’s work, on and off, on Qatar’s top selling English language newspaper, the Gulf Times, came to fruition. Launch week passed in a flurry of meetings with sub-editors around their desks and late night Indian take-aways in Doha. The changes we made were huge – by any standards – and involved the whole structure and shape of the paper as well as fonts, grids and layouts. Neil Cook, the managing editor, said: “Shakeup Media did a first rate job both in design and also in working with us on implementation. Their long newspaper experience meant that the design not only looked great, it really worked in practice and helped editors improve the organisation and projection of news, comment and features. The paper overall is much improved and readers have reacted very positively”.
The Venice Report
Several months work, on and off, on a major report from Venice in Peril, the charity that finances research into the problems of Venice, saw the light of day. Chairman, Anna Somers Cocks wanted us to turn a collection of scholarly essays into a publication that looked beautiful and presented all the technical information in a series of lucid and precise graphics. Once we had selected the typefaces and decided on the best presentation of the text and display copy, we worked with some fine photographers and a mass of detailed statistical material to come up with a handsome book-length report that communicates nearly as much visually as it does in the words.
Current projects
Current occupations include two big websites — one in the education sector and one in publishing – and two magazines — one launch and one relaunch (one is a new weekly news magazine coming out next spring and the other is the redesign of a respected international title).
Other News
· We moved offices – the new address is Shakeup Media, 5th Floor, Haymarket House, 1 Oxendon Street, London SW1Y 4EE – equidistant between Piccadilly Circus and Leicester Square tubes
· Since January, Richard has been editor in chief and director of content for an educational web platform called imJack (imJack.com) which provides secure social networking to schools and is planning to launch a variety of material including current affairs next year. The focus is on the UK but there’s no reason why it shouldn’t develop into an international business.
· The book that Richard spent the winter working on with Stephen Green, chairman of HSBC, was published by Allen Lane in July and was subsequently long-listed by the FT for Business Book of the Year. Good Value: Reflections on Money, Morality and an Uncertain World is, of course, available from Amazon.
If we can help you with design, writing, editing or media advice please contact us through our website www.shakeupmedia.com
September 18th, 2009
I am now officially fluent in newspaper Arabic. I can speak about columns, fonts, positioning, stories and bylines. I know the word for ghost (because photo cut-outs shouldn’t float like them), and for gigantic (because headlines always needed to be bigger). I even have a handle on the various hand gestures Arabic folk tend to pepper their conversation with. Its an eccentric vocabulary to be sure but its also the definition of useful. Drop me into any Arabic newsroom in the world and I would be totally fine. Just don’t ask me to order food or talk to a real person.
I learned my sprinkling of the language in the newsroom of Al Watan, the liberal-leaning national newspaper in Saudi Arabia and our first Arab language client. Al Watan is 10 years old. When it launched in Saudi, it changed the face of newspapers. In the past 10 years, the other newspapers in the country haven’t so much evolved as copied the innovations of Al Watan. The idea behind the current project was to push the Al Watan 10 years ahead of the pack. Again.The overall project was split into two parts. The first was technical and skills oriented. Our friends at Human Capital (especially Tim Ewington and Zadok Prescott) and I spent more than two weeks helping with the transition from Quark to Indesign CS4 ME and training a large and relatively inexperienced design staff in both the new program and the basic design principles that underpin the basis of the new look (including the use of photography, color, structure, etc). The second was about finally introducing that new look, nurtured for months and put through severe editorial scrutiny, focus groups and print tests, to the world.
It was a daunting learning curve, not only designing from right to left but basically relearning typography from scratch and coming to terms with not being able to speak or read the language. This final limitation was probably the hardest for us, we Shakeup Medians pride ourselves on our literacy and special relationship with words. After all, we are, all of us, readers and writers first (and by training) and designers second.
Still Ellen and I spent weeks learning about the vagaries of Arabic typography (with lots of help, thank you Nadine and many many others) and, after all that, decided we wanted nothing more than make our own. So we did. Or, more precisely, the wonderful and wonderfully talented Pascal Zhogobi, one of the most exciting young Arabic typographers working today, did, with only the slightest of direction from us. The new font, Al Watan Headline is the core of the new design.
Like many of Pascal’s fonts, Al Watan Headline is inspired by old Arabic hot metal type workshops found in Lebanon and across the Arabic world. Pascal’s genius is an ability to combine traditional forms with a modern and young flair. Its like a hot pink bowler; classy and traditional but unmistakably modern. We used the Linotype classic Yakout for body type and TheSansArab by Lucas Fonts for various secondary labelling.
We instituted a number of modern newspaper techniques, including a three layer headline system; colorful photo-based pull quotes; prominent sidebar and background boxes; color coded sections; a series of L-shaped front pages that allow loads of display space without interfering with the sanctity of the news area; larger, more dynamic, better cropped photographs; more vertical pages; spreads that don’t interfere with each other; better infographics; and many many other things….
The biggest change, though, was the conversion of Al Watan from a paper that strived to be comprehensive above all else to an edited newspaper that strives to tell readers what is important and why. Of course much of the credit for this is should go to the editorial staff at Al Watan, particularly the Editor Jamal Khashoggi and his deputies plus the talented former BBC and Al Hayat journalist the paper brought in to help with the editorial side of the relaunch, Youssef Khazem.
The new paper is split in to two bodies. News, Opinion and Sport in the first body with Business, Life and Culture in the second. See below for photos from the relaunch and some sample pages.
April 28th, 2009
Most newspapers follow a fairly predictable trajectory in the days and weeks following a relaunch. The inevitable minor flaws of the first day’s paper are ironed out under intense collaboration between newspaper staff and the relaunch team. For a few days the resulting paper steers a course close to the designers’ vision. When the design team goes home, however, and the initial enthusiasm for the new approach wanes in the face of the day-to-day scrum of putting together a paper, old habits often creep back. Corners begin to be cut, new procedures fall by the wayside and a steady decline in quality begins.
Which is why the newspapers coming out of the Gulf Times offices two weeks later are so impressive. The staff are still putting together a paper that is vastly more accessible and appealing than in its previous incarnation, due to the following factors:
1. Pages that are better organised due to a clear hierarchy of stories and a strong focus to each page.
2. More effective use of pictures to provide visual contrast and interest.
3. Use of page furniture – drop quotes, break-out boxes, graphics – to create story packages that strengthen the hierarchy and provide multiple entry-points to a page.
4. Clear section and story labelling that aid in navigation, through the paper and around the page.
March 13th, 2009
Sitting in Tallinn last week with an excellent bunch of art directors and a large pile of papers (all in Estonian), design principles became more abstract. Not understanding the stories served to highlight the visual principles at work. And it reminded everyone just how universal really are the rules of making a good newspaper.
So, with thanks to my fellow judges, here is what emerged from my notes: the seven secrets of news design.
- Layout — including strong story hierarchy, building the page from the centre outwards, building in proper contrast and vibrancy to the page, thinking in spreads, sticking to a grid and using space to led the whole thing breathe
- Pictures — including the use of horizontal and vertical contrast, variety of depth, bold cropping and occasional use of a mild tilt to add interest to an otherwise worthy image.
- Type — including the adherence to a strict hierarchy of weights/sizes and a deliberate contrast between short, shy labels and longer, fuller headlines
- Colour — including restraint in use of half-tones and tints and careful preparation of a systematic and logical palette
- Navigation — including a system of colour coding, labelling and cross-referencing and a strong method of building and differentiating story packages on news pages
- Packages — including a simple set of furniture for building story packages: subsidiary stories, sidebars, pull-quotes, graphics and photos
- Graphics — including a clear distinction between info-graphics (graphs and charts) and illustration (photo-montages and drawing) but with a recognition that both skills are essential to great newspaper design
If these areas were properly managed, we all agreed, the proof of the pudding would be in the reading. The result would be a newspaper that was absolutely user-friendly, consistent and (most important of all) interesting.
February 26th, 2009
One of those flurries of work travel (Estonia, Qatar) on top of recent trips to Africa, has convinced me of a need that we at Shakeup would be keen to supply. Can anyone think of way to publicise it … and possibly to fund it from aid money or development grants so that it could be a free service to publishers?
Working on newspapers in developing countries is inspiring because they are generally delivering a demonstrable benefit to society: spreading information and exposing corruption in places where there’s a massive need and where there are no alternative independent mass communications (broadband, patchy; TV, a government mouthpiece; radio, light entertainment).
Often these papers are founded by courageous individuals (such as Hans Luik in Estonia or Charles ‘Mase’ Onyango-Obbo in Uganda) who subsequently become powers in the land but are not (and never especially wanted to be) expert newspaper publishers. Hostile governments and nervous advertisers add to their financial pressures. Insecurity makes it difficult to retain skills and develop staff. The newspaper suffers. The public are let down.
Like doctors visiting field hospitals where bad practices are needlessly putting patients’ lives at risk, we visit newspapers where rivers of scarce cash are wasted on needless faffing around and where there is next to no idea about how to organise a newsroom, commission, edit and design a good newspaper or market a title to its natural readership.
This hurts. It hurts because newspapers always matter and they matter especially in developing countries. And it would be relatively easy (or at least not impossible) to double some of these papers’ efficiency and double their quality at the same time, creating a better media and a secure independent sector.
So here’s the idea: a publisher’s toolkit, like an IKEA house, with everything you need in one box to run a clever, modern, successful newspaper. We’d give them basic, good design; decent fonts; work-flow management systems; the latest indesign software; newsroom layouts; production plans; marketing rules and a daily editorial schedule. One from a pool of senior editors and publishers would be on hand to help install the toolkit — which could be a complete or partial replacement of an existing operation. And once installed, it would be adapted and individualised of course to fit the special requirements of the title in question.
In my conception, this would be a free service for anyone in a developing country who was running an independent newspaper that was doing its best to tell the truth.
February 24th, 2009
In The Snail – Tallinn’s hidden gem — a fascinating couple of hours with Priit Hobemagi, editor-in-chief of Eesti Ekspress, and Hans Luik, the founder and owner.
They run the “New Yorker” of Estonia…well, not really, but it is weekly, it aims high and it specialises in long pieces of reportage and investigation.
It is not rolling in cash but it is surviving — though some pretty aggressive commercialism being (near enough) Berliner format newsprint wrapped in several glossy pages of (mainly) advertising.
This, in a country of less than 1.5 million people where 400,000 of them are Russian speakers and therefore not in the market for an Estonian weekly, seems remarkable.
Hobemagi and Luik are entirely matter-of-fact about their success. First, they only print content that is original work and exclusive to them. Second, they only print what you cannot get from any other publisher in Estonia: high quality story telling, long-form journalism, eye-witness features and in-depth exposes.
They are dimissive about any information that is freely available anywhere - sports, news, weather etc. “Why bother competing?”. They reckon anyone of influence in Estonia has to read Eesti Ekspress every week, which attracts advertisers.
And they are reviewing their policy of putting the complete edition on the web on the day of publication in favour of delaying it by a couple of days or erecting at least a thin veil around it by asking for full registration details before giving away content for nothing.
The believe they are making something valuable and unique, selling it for a decent price and creating a clear channel for advertisers.
How delightful it was to hear the confidence they had evolved over two decades of publication in such a sensible journalistic model. And how impressive that they are able to publish the sort of journalism in a tiny country that we, in a far larger and richer country, don’t seem to be able to afford.
It slightly made me wonder: are we overstating the media revolution? Do we perhaps have too many excitable visionaries and media eggheads in London for our own good? How many hundreds of media businesses are quietly humming along in the UK, like Eesti Ekspress in Tallinn, and will do for many years to come?
February 21st, 2009
Blogging - and indeed all other activity except breathing - had to stop for a while because a book deadline was pressing and chapters had to be handed in.
It is a fascinating book not in the slightest because I am involved but because it outlines the thoughts of Stephen Green, the chairman of HSBC, one of the few bankers to emerge with a reputation unspoilt by recent events.
Penguin are publishing it in June so I will not give away too much at this stage. But as I emerge from the cell where I work, blinking, back into the light, here is what I have been thinking about.
Six ways to avoid selling your soul:
- Integrity: based on honesty and trust and a real desire to exchange value for value
- Relationships: treat others as ends as well as means
- Ambition: aim to contribute the most, not get the most
- Balance: four areas; family, work, friends and the inner life
- Leadership: treat everyone as a leader
- Direction: What value is what I do? Why am I doing it and not someone else?
And not just one at a time. All six at once.
Meanwhile, looking around me once more, I see that everything has become worse.
Many more have lost their jobs. Print has been declared deader than ever. More titles are teetering on the edge of closure.
And yet…there are some great ideas bubbling through. More soon.
February 12th, 2009
Lebedev is not really the story. Murdoch is.
Page eleven of the Murdoch-owned London Paper today gives us a clue to how he — and therefore his senior staff — are thinking.
In a full page victory memo from the London Paper’s editor it says, in so many words, that:
- The London Paper has killed the Standard as a serious paper
- Murdoch’s strategy forced Rothermere to sell
- The Standard lost the plot
- The Standard will henceforth be a minor, eccentric player on the London stage
- The London Paper is projecting fat profits in the future
- London Lite has lost its raison d’etre (to defend the Standard)
Murdoch is thrilled by the turn of events. With his son-in-law watching over the development of The Standard in the next few years it is unlikely to become too troublesome. I would not be surprised if it is sharing office space and printing facilities at Wapping in three years and three days from now (once contractual guarantees with Associated have expired).
Next move from the Australian fox? To decapitate Metro. Do not be surprised to see the London Paper produce a morning edition and bid for the valuable tube distribution rights in London when they come up later this year.
Perhaps it is a bit childish to think like this, but in macho competitive terms this story is game, set and match to Murdoch.
For Associated it looks dangerously like a tipping point — the year when they started losing. It used to be part of the DNA of Associated to win. Without that ferocity, the company starts to look rather sad, like a non-violent lion.
January 23rd, 2009
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