There goes print | García Media

In Germany, the weekly magazine Der Spiegel captured the spirit of the trend with this graphic, and you don’t need to understand German to follow it:

The graphic accompanied an interview with Julian Reichelt, chief editor of the iconic German newspaper, Bild.

In a nutshell, the interview revealed a tune that we have heard before in dozens of newspapers globally: 150 to 200 editors are losing their jobs at Bild, which is owned by the powerful and innovative Axel Springer Media. Now Bild is to become more of a TV brand.

Revenue from print is shrinking rapidly and revenue from paid digital content is rising, but not enough to compensate and to finance a huge editors team as BILD has. Thus, the shrinking of the newsroom.

The editor tells in the interview that his team wants to show reality with emotions, from the burning forests in the Amazonm with the people stories that go with it.

As now, no TV station provides reality as BILD does on its page 2, Reichelt says. So this may be a transferring of a successful formula from one medium to another, but TV? Perhaps the editor and his team know something that the rest of us don’t. Of course, millennials watch a lot of TV programming on their mobile devices, so depending on the content, BILD may take its content to the right audience, but in a different medium.

Meanwhile in the US: another small newspaper closes

***Photo by JONATHAN WIGGS/GLOBE STAFF. Courtesy of The Boston Globe.***

In one Maine town, the home paper that had been chronicling the area’s happenings for 135 years has said goodbye. The Journal Tribune of Biddeford, Maine, stopped publishing last week, joining nearly 2,000 papers nationwide that have closed in the past 15 years.

Here are some of the facts:

The Journal Tribune’s print circulation had fallen to around 2,000, though the paper covered the cities of Biddeford and Saco, with a joint population of about 40,000. It’s not clear what the paper’s peak circulation was, though Sandy Marsters, who worked at the paper in various roles between 1980 and 1995, including as managing editor, said staffers from the time recall that it was as high as 15,000 in 1990. Although the online version of the paper had reached a record of slightly more than 350,000 total page views in July, there wasn’t much money to be made that way.
“Despite efforts to reduce expenses and grow revenue, we have not been able to make the Journal Tribune profitable,” Masthead Maine chief executive Lisa DeSisto this month. Six staff members will be laid off; several others will join other Brower-owned papers.

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