Portuguese daily newspaper i (short for informação, not to be confused with the new bite-sized Independent), has been named the world’s best designed newspaper by the Society for News Design.

Judges in the 32nd annual Best of Newspaper Design Creative Competition said that the paper “stood out for its ability to take the best of the visual language of newspapers, magazines and other publications and create something new that is more than the sum of its parts”.

It’s compact. It’s fresh. It’s consistent, yet full of surprises. Its magazine-like size allows the reader to hold the newspaper close; the format invites the reader to engage more deeply. The publication is packed with information, yet extremely well organized, using elements of layering and editing to draw readers into every page.

i, which is closer to a magazine in format and is stapled, launched in May 2009, aiming to experiment as much as possible with design and layout. “”We just don’t care,” said Martim Figueiredo, publisher and editor of i, at the 2009 World Association of Newspapers (WAN) conference.

“There are no obligations. The only obligation of our news team is to target what people want each morning (…) we organise the news so that people don’t get lost.”

The paper also launched with the idea of targeting an untapped audience. According to a report from the Editors Weblog in 2009, 23 per cent of i’s readers had not regularly read newspapers before.

The title won European Newspaper of the Year in the 2009 European Newspaper Awards.

See a slideshow of images of i at this link.

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Newspaper Innovation looks at the Independent’s plans to launch a new 20p daily newspaper and considers its sources of inspiration, including Portuguese newspaper i (as mentioned by Journalism.co.uk on Monday).

This paper was launched in May 2009 with a print run of 100,000. Cover price was €1 – so more expensive than the Independent’s ‘i’ and also with more pages. The paper is published by Sojormedia Capital, owned by the Lena Group.

Since launch, however, the paper got in serious troubles, as the public demand for the paper was less than expected. Editor Martim Avillez Figuereido left the paper after disagreements with the management.

The post also considers the fortunes of similar “lite” newspapers, such as Welt Kompakt, Chicago’s RedEye and Red Streak – and suggests that the Independent’s plans might not be plain sailing.

Full post on Newspaper Innovation at this link…

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Over on the main site we’re reporting on how a recently launched Portuguese newspaper, i, is innovating across platforms – targeting breaking news online at social networks; redesigning the traditional print format to four section; and redesigning its newsroom.

The seven-month-old title has shown circulation growth and is attracting previously non-newspaper consumers as readers, says publisher and editor Martim Figueiredo.

Read the full piece on i at this link – here are some photos of a special edition of the paper prepared for the World Association of Newspapers (WAN) conference, to give you an idea of what it looks like:

All coverage of #WANIndia2009 from Journalism.co.uk can be found at this link.

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“Formula one boss Max Mosley today attacked the Press Complaints Commission and the newspaper industry’s system of self-regulation while criticising the Daily Mail editor, Paul Dacre, chairman of the PCC editors’ code committee,” reports MediaGuardian here.

During the same hearing of the culture, media and sport committee currently looking into UK press regulation and media law, Gerry McCann “called for more stringent regulation of the press and slammed coverage surrounding the disappearance of his daughter in Portugal in 2007, calling it some of the most ‘irresponsible and damaging’ in press history,” MediaGuardian also reports here.

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“In its 30th annual ‘The Best of Newspaper Design™ Creative Competition,’ the Society for News Design has named four newspapers from Europe and one from Mexico as ‘World’s Best-Designed Newspapers,™” the organisation’s website reports.

This year’s SND30 five top ‘World’s Best-Designed Newspapers™’ are:

• Akzia, Moscow, Russia, biweekly, circulation 200,000
• Eleftheros Tipos, Athens, Greece, daily, circulation, 86,000
• Expresso, Paço de Arcos, Portugal, weekly, circulation 120,000
• The News, Mexico City, daily, circulation 10,000
• Welt am Sonntag, Berlin, weekly, 400,000

Full story at this link…

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Following his comments at the Society of Editors (SoE) conference that suggestions that the media had caused the current banking crisis were ‘laughable’, BBC Business editor Robert Peston was questioned about his use of a blog on bbc.co.uk.

Peston said he wasn’t a ‘proper blogger’ insofar as he didn’t use his blog to speculate.

“I apply exactly the same standards of verification to a blog as I do to anything else I do,” he explained.

“I can do two things with a blog: I can get stuff out very quickly; but the most valuable thing about the blog if you work for an organisation like the BBC is that you can put out an amount of detail you can’t get in a three minute bulletin.”

The comments left by readers of the blog are ‘incredibly valuable’, as it can make you think about a story in a different way, he added.

“The great advantage of the blog is that you are constantly out there putting nuggets out that will give you stuff back and allow you to complete the story more quickly,” he said.

in the same conference session, Clarence Mitchell, spokesman for Kate and Gerry McCann, was less complimentary describing the downside of the blogosphere as ‘the lynchmob gone digital’.

Speaking with regards to the Madeleine McCann case, Mitchell said: “Where comment strays beyond the bounds of acceptability we will take action. Because story has engendered a degree of controversy and debate we have to cope with that on a daily basis.”

The case is still ‘very much ongoing’, according to Mitchell, and the McCanns see the media as partners in the search for their daughter when reporting is ‘fair and accurate’.

Settlements between the media and the McCanns and with friends they were holidaying with at the time of Madeleine’s disappearance now total more than £1 million, he said.

Mitchell also accused the British press in Portugal of being lazy at the time of the incident, choosing to sit in the local bar and turning to the Portugese media for leads.

“A quote from me and that was considered balanced journalism. Even when I said I didn’t have anything, front pages would duly appear,” he said.

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• FT.com on Robert Peston: the characters shouldn’t get bigger than the brand

Swedes are getting so hooked on social media that for many web-crazy young things reality-TV has all but moved online.

Last night Twingly, the Swedish web company that supplies a blog trackback functionality to newspapers world-wide and last week launched its international spam free blog search engine Twingly.com, aired the first programme of its new reality-series on YouTube: The Summer of Code.

YouTube reality-show
“We have recruited four ambitious interns and given them six weeks to develop a visual search engine for blogs; Twingly Blogoscope,” said Martin Källström, CEO of Twingly.

“Everyone can follow what happens in the project via daily episodes on YouTube.”

The episodes will be uploaded Monday to Friday at 6 PM GMT (10 AM in San Francisco, 19:00 in Stockholm) and the first programme aired last night.

“Openness in this project is a way to show the daily life in the office,” said Källström.

“Generally people are not familiar with the stimulating working atmosphere in a start-up. Hopefully Twingly Summer of Code will inspire more people to join Twingly or other start-ups.”

Media increasingly about conversation
Last week, Twingly launched its search engine Twingly.com to track 30 million blogs all over the world.

Despite this global scope, Källström said Twingly will concentrate on being number one in Europe, working with several different European languages.

“Google has not improved its blog search for more than two years,” he told Journalism.co.uk.

The company has teamed up with newspapers in Spain, Portugal, Holland, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland and South Africa, to show blog links to the news sites’ articles.

Källström added that his hope was for Twingly to be able to take on both Google and Technorati by providing more functionality and driving traffic to bloggers via its media partnerships.

“Media is more and more about the conversation between media and its readers. We see a very strong synergy between mainstream media and bloggers and try to provide a bridge that can improve this synergy,” he said.

Blogs have replaced docusoaps
Twingly’s target group for The Summer of Code will no doubt draw an audience of uber-geeks but a young Swedish reporter recently admitted she was addicted to a very different sort of ‘web docusoap’.

Madeleine Östlund, a reporter with the Swedish equivalent of Press Gazette, Dagens Media, claimed the country’s fashion blogs had replaced docusoaps (link in Swedish).

She confessed she found it increasingly difficult to live without her daily fix of intimate everyday details and gossip from the country’s high-profile fashion bloggers, a phenomenon Journalism.co.uk has described here.

“It is not their blogging about clothes that draws me in, rather it is the surprise and fascination with which I read about these young girls’ private lives. Surprise and fascination about how much they often reveal,” she wrote, citing posts about broken hearts, hospital stays, what they had for breakfast and descriptions of a caesarian birth.

Roll on the Web 2.0 docusoap about dashing media journalists, I say.

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