This is the weekend edition of TheMarioBlog and will be updated as needed. The next blog is Monday, June 13, and I will be reporting from Cartagena, Colombia, during teh WAN IFRA World Congress.
La Voz said goodbye to its broadsheet format Sunday, June 5, trading it for a Berliner format.
The first two days after the introduction of the Berliner format
Readers of La Voz sent us pictures of them reading the first Sunday edition of the newspaper in the Berliner format. Great reactions overall.
The team of La Voz del Interior, of Cordoba, Argentina, has made June 5, Sunday, a historical moment in the history of that 112-year-old newspaper. It was that day that the citizens of Argentina's second largest city woke up to a smaller, easier to manage version of their newspaper. The people of Cordoba take their newspaper seriously, and welcome it as a member of the family.
On the first edition with the new format, a long time reader declared that he had been reading the newspaper since 1949 and that, in fact, his grandfather had taught him to read using La Voz.
For us at Garcia Media, La Voz is also a member of the family. I first became involved with a redesign of La Voz in 1995, working closely with the then art director, the late Miguel (Cachoito) Di Lorenzi, a man with a passion for typography, design and illustration. Later in the early 2000s, our team at Garcia Media LatinAmerica, Buenos Aires, formed by senior art directors Rodrigo Fino and Paula Ripoll, came to La Voz for a “mini redesign and touch up”.
For the past year, however, we have been working on this major conversion and reimagining of La Voz from a broadsheet to a Berliner format. We have worked with the talented internal team headed by editor in chief, Carlos Jornet, as well as managing editor Franco Piccato and art director Soledad Soria.. The rethink project for La Voz was headed internally by associate editor, Julio Perotti.
The new format’s essentials
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The new format includes a grid of five columns. Advertising is built around this five column grid, over 10 ad modules.
The typographic palette includes: Guardian Sans, Guardian Narrow and Lyon Display. The text is set in Nimrod.
A color palette has been created, color coding each section. Blue is the brand color, starting with the logo.
The overall design
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The emphasis is on a lively, visual front page for the daily, and perhaps a more magazine presentation for the weekend. As luck wouuld have it, on the second day of the new format, the local soccer (futbol) team qualified for the First League, a ranking that had evaded it for 12 years. This was, of course, a major celebration and an opportunity to run a poster front page style.
The same visual impact, with a large photographic Center of Visual Impact is carried through inside pages.
White space and secondary elements that enhance storytelling play an important role throughout every page.
The view from the top
On the first day of the launch of the new format, La Voz published a special supplement outlining the changes, providing a historical context to the various graphic changes of La Voz through the years, and presenting key changes in the new La Voz.
Here are highlights:
Carlos Jornet, Editor in chief
“In our understanding of this process, the most profound change is not that of format, but the new focus on content. That was our main objective when we involved our team of reporters, visual reporters, designers, info graphics artists, illustrators and editors that worked for months to achieve the newspaper that you see today. It is a newspaper with more depth, more contextualization, more added value, more localness.”
Osvaldo Salas, CEO/Publisher,
“This relaunch is part of a major internal project called La Voz Global 2020, which aims at taking a look at all that we do and how we will do it better to adapt to the needs of our audience and the changes in technology. Our aim is to find new and better ways to connect all the citizens of Cordoba in the years ahead.
“So we assembled about 100 of our staffers, from all departments, and involved them, many of them representing the new generations, to try to find better ways to inform, to entertain and to provide better services and commercial offers.
“Present in all our deliberations, the big challenge of gathering and distributing information in the digital age, adapting to the new ways our audience consumes information, and to deal with an audience that is connected and looking for information 24 hours a day, and doing so without losing sight of our traditions and those values that have made La Voz a member of the family for over a century.”
The related TV interview (in Spanish)
My TV interview (in Spanish):
Mario Garcia es un trotamundos y mentor de nuestro diario
(Mario Garcia is a globetrotter and mentor to our newspaper)
http://www.lavoz.com.ar/…/mario-garcia-un-trotamundos-y-men…
The view from the man in the press kiosk
Juan Viva heads a unit that sells La Voz at point of purchase kiosks, where street sales rule. He wrote this to the La Voz management following the day of the launch of La Voz with its new format:'
“The new launch of La Voz with its smaller format has truly called a lot of attention on the part of our readers to the new product, some with amazement, others in a very naturally receptive way, others hoping to adapt with time to the new format, and all morning since the first copies arrived, people kept talking and offering opinions about the change of La Voz. Overall, everyone sees La Voz, their newspaper, as a rebirth with a look toward the future, and with a new focus on content. I know that this new product has taken time to create, and we think that the new format is elegant, contemporary, with class, and with the credibility of always, which is what makes La Voz, the leader in the market, and the more welcome in all of the Cordoba households.”
In Spanish:
El lanzamiento del nuevo formato tabloide llamó muchísimo la atención a
todos nuestros queridos amigos y conocidos lectores; algunos con asombro, otros de
manera natural, otros que se adaptaran con el tiempo, y así toda la mañana se la
pasaron hablando y opinando sobre el cambio que desde La Voz del Interior está
renaciendo hacía un futuro mejor, con el nuevo enfoque de los contenidos. Esta
nueva propuesta seguramente les ha llevado mucho tiempo y el resultado del mismo
es que el Diario ahora es mucho más elegante, contemporáneo, con clase, y por
sobre todo con credibilidad ya que por algo sigue siendo el líder, el diario más
vendido y aceptado en todos los hogares de nuestra provincia.