Notice the belt ad for car running through the middle of this inside page
Eric Beziat, art director, emerged from all the heavy work of the past two days to report : “Mario, this is exciting, and we have been running out of copies of the newspaper each day since it came out. People are calling to tell us how much they like it. Fresh and new, but with the same serious type of financial journalism they have come to expect.”
Meanwhile, Karyn Bauer, the American secretary to Olivier Royant, editor of Paris Match, puts it differently: “Mario, love the new La Tribune. It is The Wall Street Journal with a 30 Rock flavor.”
Here are the last group of pages I have received from Eric, the Tuesday and Wednesday front pages, along with inside news pages and editorial/opinion page.
Here is the front page of La Tribune for Monday, Oct. 27th, first day of the new formula, in Berliner format, with a new navigator on Page One.
Other pages to be shown here as they become available.
The old and the new La Tribune front page
Updated October 28, 2008—more updates to come throughout the day today
Serious does not mean boring
I remember my first meeting with La Tribune’s director, Valerie Decamp: it was a lunch at a plush, but quite busy, Paris restaurant. The tall and talkative Valerie, whose newspaper trajectory had brought her to La Tribune from the free newspaper, Metro, knew exactly what she wanted, and how she wanted.
“I want you to make La Tribune very lively, colorful, full of energy, and full of news, analysis, and topics that the readers have not seen elsewhere, that is what I want,” Valerie told me two minutes after we met.
Knowing what the management wants is, indeed, the first step in what you know will be a successful project: a manager who is focused, knows direction, target audiences, and has no preconceived ideas that a “financial daily” has to be boring.
Valerie talks fast, and she wanted the project to move fast.
Fast it was. We began around May, launch of the new-formula La Tribune is Monday, Oct. 27.
Enter the new art director: Eric Beziat
One of Valerie’s most effective moves was to hire Eric Beziat as art director. Together, Eric and I met frequently, both in person and in cyberspace, to create the look that you see here.
Every successful design needs an editor who contributes ideas, and who is sure of what he wants: we found this in La Tribune’s new editor, Erik Izraelewicz,
Highlights:
Larger format: At a time when so many newspapers go smaller, La Tribune’s strategy was to go to the Berliner format, from a standard tabloid. I am an advocate of compact, of course, but in this case, the idea is to allow for each of the sections to stand out. “We want to make a dramatic change that is visible to our audience,” Valerie told me as we discussed the larger format.
New branding: Gone is the old La Tribune logo, in the Bordeaux color with white letters. In is a logo with a blue background, but “attached” visually to a navigator to the best “surprise” stories of the day.
New typography: The type combination now involves Verlag in its various weights, but with an emphasis on boldness rarely seen in traditional finance/economics dailies. Chronicle, an elegant serif font, is used as a secondary font, to bring elegance and contrast to each page.
Color palette: We tested orange before we went for blue, but it was decided that it would be good to have blue as the daily color, and orange for Le Journal de Weekend.
Efficient navigation: Perhaps the most reader-friendly element of this rethinking of La Tribune is the Page One navigator, called L’Essentiel, and that is what it is. Borrowed from the highly successful and efficient What’s News from The Wall Street Journal, it summarizes in a few lines, the top stories that are MUST READ for each day.
Advertising innovation: The new La Tribune will experiment with ad positioning. Already many of these ads have been sold ahead of time, including “silent ad” on Page One navigator, plus interesting display of various strategies as shown here.
Personally, I am extremely happy and pleased with this new formula for La Tribune. Readers will appreciate the fact that this new La Tribune offers something for everyone. Those readers who want to read La Tribune in two or three seatings during the day, will have a great navigator to guide them; the ones who would like to sit down and read more in-depth, will have excellent content to analyze. Visually, the new La Tribune offers more graphics to help readers understand complex stories. For a generation of Google surfers, the ones who want everything now, this new formula of La Tribune has it all—-the newspaper for the Internet generation, but with the seriousness, depth and reliable content that they have come to expect from a brand like La Tribune.
Everybody wins.
Offering advertisers different options
Inside pages: rhythm and labels that say “click” for topics
A page about the business and environment
Le Journal de Weekend: more magazine approach
For the video of La Tribune’s advertising of its new formula: ?
http://fr.youtube.com/watch?v=_bB1VTrXuLc
For Mario’s “editorial” on today’s first issue of the new La Tribune (in French):
http://www.latribune.fr/entreprises/communication/publicite—medias/20081026trib000302948/le-journal-de-la-google-generation.html
And now: the diagonal ad on Page One
The Times of India’s front page today sports a blue diagonal line running diagonally across the front page. It sends readers to a Dell computers ad on the back page of the section. This is a first for us. It is more intrusive on page one territory than even the wrap around front page ad, as this one requires readers to jump over it as they read a story. Wonder how readers feel about it, not to mention the editors and designers who had to work with the rather intricate structure. What next?
Getting ahead of the news
The New Mexico Sun News is an alternative newspaper that comes out bi-monthly. Since their next edition would be after the U.S. Election, the editors decided to make a guess, proclaiming the candidate they support, Sen. Barack Obama, the winner. In this case, print is, indeed, eternal, as the 10000 copies of the edition were snapped quickly by collectors. The Sun is not the first newspaper to get ahead of the news. In 1948, the Chicago Daily Tribune proclaimed Thomas Dewey the winner over HarryTruman. The front page is one of the most eternal ones ever published!
http://www.editorsweblog.org/newspaper/2008/10/france_la_tribune_to_relaunch_next_week.phphttp://www.editorsweblog.org/
My last in Delhi, then returning to Europe, and headed for a few days of hopefully sun, rest and running in the Canary Islands.
TheMarioBlog posting #131