South Africa’s Rapport: doing print happily

TheMarioBlog has become the place where such manifestations of good work in print appear. I plan to continue to highlight the good work taking place in print, and urge my colleagues globally to send me examples. Here we celebrate great storytelling and design across platforms, but we have a special place to celebrate when those things happen via ink on paper.

Recently I praised the work of The Washington Post’s Design Team as the local baseball team, the Nationals, won the World Series. This week I received an email complete with sample pages from Andries Gouws, Chief Designer of the South African Sunday broadsheet, Rapport, a 98000 circulation newspaper published nationally.

Andries began his email like this:

Our newspaper did print happily here in South Africa when the Springboks won the Rugby World Cup in Japan last Saturday.

Here is the front page of the Rapport celebrating the team’s win:

How the story came to be

As I always do in cases where a major news event is carried out through a variety of pages in what becomes a major project, I asked Andries how the story’s coverage evolved:

“Rapport’s sports editor, Albert Weideman, and I started talking about the plan a couple of days before the game. He said: If we win, we do a poster front page without a story. If we lose, the lead story on page 1 will be about the game. His idea was to do a timeline on the front page about key moments. We thought: If we win, the front page should be something that people would like to keep, but at the same time it had to be packed with data on the game.

(We briefly considered to do a wraparound front page if South Africa wins – but as you know, the quarter of the picture visible above the fold on the stand can just look weird.)”

Colleague Dawie Boonzaaier kept notes during the game of key moments, and I built the timeline on top using deep-etches from the game.

On the spread in the sports pages every Springbok gets a mark out of 10 and a report card on the game.

The “lead” story was used on page 3 – that advertisement does not leave much to work with, but it’s fine, since page 1 worked out nicely.

And the player in the main picture on the back page of Sport is Makazole Mapimpi, the first Springbok player ever to score a try for South Africa in a World Cup Final. At the bottom of the page: More stats on how the teams matched up.

The feedback from readers

The public loved the paper and it seems as if it nearly sold out.

With events like a World Cup win, I guess the strong point for print is not only the luxury of using large pictures, but also the fact that readers then want to hold the product in their hands – and maybe actually keep it for a while.

Launch party for The Story in Zurich

From Monocle Weekend

THE INTERROGATOR / EDITION 30

https://monocle.com/minute/2019/09/21/

Mario García

Editorial consultant Mario García has advised the most important newsrooms in the world on design – and how best adapt to a digital transition. More than 700 publications, from The Wall Street Journal to the South China Morning Post, have received his strategic steer. Other than being an adjunct professor at Columbia University’s School of Journalism, he also runs his own consultancy firm: García Media. Nowadays his speciality is how digital devices influence narrative structure and consumption; his latest book, The Story, was written specifically to be read on a phone. Here, though, he confesses to a few analogue pleasures.

What they are saying about The Story!

The Story is here!

You can now download my new mobile storytelling book, The Story, from Apple Books at $6.99
This is Book 1 of a Trilogy! The other two books coming soon.
https://books.apple.com/us/book/the-story-volume-i/id1480169411

The newspaper remains the most powerful source of storytelling on the planet. But technology threatens its very existence. To survive, the Editor must transform, adapt, and manage the newsroom in a new way. Order The Story by Mario Garcia, chief strategist for the redesign of over 700 newspapers around the world.

My chat with in Monocle Radio

Listen to my chat in Monocle Radio’s The Stack: Latest episode‘The Face’ and ‘The Story’:We welcome the return of the print version of ‘The Face’ and talk to legendary newspaper designer Mario Garcia about his latest book, ‘The Story’.
https://monocle.com/radio/shows/the-stack/368/play/

My interview with CNN en Español

I was a guest in the program Encuentro, hosted by Guillermo Arduino daily at CNN en Español. The interview was about how we read on mobile devices and my introduction of my new mobile storytelling book, The Story, to a Spanish-language audience.

García: Si tienes una buena historia, la gente la va a leer