This is a weekend post of TheMarioBlog and will be updated as needed until new blog post Monday, August 22
Update #4: Saturday, Aug. 20, Hong Kong, 22h
TAKEAWAY: On this, my last day of a action-packed week in Sydney, Australia, to participate in the PANPA Future Forum 2011 conference, a highlight of my day was my little workshop with the digital team of The Daily Telegraph, who prepare to launch a new version of their iPad app. PLUS: New travel section for The Daily AND: Luxembourg’s La Voix to close
This week in Australia: Part 5
TAKEAWAY: The PANPA Future Forum 2011 conference opens here in Sydney tomorrow. Here is an overview, as I prepare my presentation. ALSO: In Dubai, the Gulf News takes a look at its front page navigation as part of its continuous efforts to upgrade the quality of its presentation.
A new iPad app for The Daily Telegraph
This was, indeed, the highlight of my day of critiques and workshops in Sydney today, my last day in the beautiful city Down Under.
I met with the talented and energetic group of The Daily Telegraph’s digital team to review their prototypes for an upcoming upgrade of their already existing app, available thru the iTunes store since November 2010.
But the material presented to me shows a dramatic change from the 1.0 version that appears there now. They are moving from an app that resembles the printed product quite closely, to one that will surprise you with its originality, uniqueness and aesthetics. True, part of our workshop discussion was to eliminate the small “remnants” of print thinking that appear here and there, but nothing major.
This is a normal process that all teams developing news apps based on an existing printed product must go through, a sort of ritual, especially if print designers are involved (indeed, we know).
But, as I always tell my workshop groups: it took early television development in the US about five years to abandon the radio paradigm. Most of those who came to produce television in the late 1930s were radio professionals. In their view, you simply put a person on who sat behind a desk and a microphone; no movement took place at all until a few years later.
So I call the imitation of the newspaper page on an iPad app “radio days”, and in our workshops we all discuss radio days aspects of the app, which are, I must admit, still inevitable.
In Friday’s workshop with The Daily Telegraph a couple of “radio days” moments crept up in the discussion, and we all laughed and made corrections.
I know that the sketches I am likely to see in the next few days from The Telegraph’s team will bring us all closer to the goal: a 3.0 version news app that I know will be talked about in the industry as a model of what can be achieved when sophistication, functionality and a sense of tablet uniqueness combine.
Let’s all be on the lookout for that!
Links of interest: my PANPA conference presentation
-Future forward; Mario Garcia
http://panpa.org.au/2011/08/15/future-forward-mario-garcia/
-Mario Garcia at the 2011 PANPA Future Forum
http://storify.com/rreibstein/mario-garcia-at-panpa-forum-2011/
Of special interest
For those “printnets” out there: the audience of people who read in print but also in digital platforms, here is a rather interesting first person account by Jack Shafer, who cancelled his print subscription to The New York Times as he found reading the online edition so much easier and faster. Well, not so fast. Jack says that he returned to the print subscription and he tells us why. Makes perfect sense.
First paragraph:
“A little over five years ago, I announced that I was canceling my subscription to the New York Times. My cancellation wasn’t in protest of Times coverage of the Middle East, ethnic minorities, religion, sex, or any of the other thousand hot-button issues that cause readers to kill their subscriptions. I was getting rid of my newsprint New York Times because the dandy redesign of NYTimes.com had made it a superior vessel for conveying the news.”
http://www.slate.com/id/2302014
New travel section this weekend at The Daily
Travel aficionados will be happy to know that starting this weekend, The Daily, the first newspaper totally created for the tablet, will start publishing a travel section. According to the promotional email sent by The Daily, “each week we will showcase destinations across the country and the world, from favorite cities to lesser known and unique places.”
The new section will appear each Saturday.
La Voix de Luxembourg to close
La Voix, left, to close, leaving L’Essentiel, a free daily, as one of three French language newspapers in Luxembourg
We get news from Luxembourg that La Voix du Luxembourg, founded in 2001, the Francophone version of the major German language daily Luxemburger Wort, will be closing. Some 30 people will lose their jobs as a result.
Both La Voix and the Wort are published by the Saint-Paul press group, which also owns the free daily Point 24.
That leaves L’essentiel a free daily newspaper , as one of the two remaining French language offerings. It is published by Edita SA: a joint venture between Switzerland’s Tamedia and Luxembourg-based Editpress. The other French-language newspapers are: Le Quotidien, founded in 2001, and the weekly, Le Jeudi, founded in 1997.Both Le Quotidien and Le Jeudi are published by Editpress (Tageblatt). Le Quotidien is 50/50 Editpress-Le Républicain Lorrain.
Although there has been no official reason given for La Voix’s closing, speculation among sources there is that St Paul publishing considers La Voix to be too expensive to run for fewer than 28 000 readers. But St. Paul still has Point 24 to put a fight with its competitors in the Luxembourg market.
L’Essential has a total of approximately 193 000 readers/day, including foreigners, Luxemburgers, and those who commute from Belgium and France to work in Luxembourg.
Point 24 in french, geman, portugese…, included also too times/week in the Wort and for a couple of times in all the letter boxes have just «progressed» from 13 to 15. A lot of money for nothing.