i-scream.net

Relating to 24sata, a croatian newspaper-tabloid

Quote:
”(Mario) Garcia, who calls himself a visual journalist and has worked on over 500 newspaper projects, thinks all newspapers will eventually convert to a tabloid format because of the Internet’s impact on readers….”
from http://37signals.com/svn/

Mr. Mario Garcia’s company was obviously employed in designing this tabloid newspaper. I have read this newspaper countless times in recent months, and I can distinctly conclude, that they are the worst papers I have ever read. I understand the conservative press, they need to make a buck or two on the account of the nationalistic idiots, and extreme right wing people. I understand the mainstream media, that prints only the stories that can be swallowed by a regular reader with an IQ under 100, but, I just cannot fucking understand, how small an IQ a man has to have, to read about dropped titties of Janet Jackson, 2 pages away from a very, very insightfull (yea, right) critic on the goverments policy on driving and drinking alcohol, and again then on the next page, read an article that has “I’m a fake title, and this whole article is a lie” writen all over it, about some guy who never even herd of the things the article says he did. You guessed it, the next page is titled: “Send Us An SMS And Rate This Georgeous 40kg 13 yearold And Get A Chance To Receive An MP3 Player!”.

Nuff about the content of the newspapers. Let’s talk concepts.

“all newspapers will eventually convert to a tabloid format because of the Internet’s impact on readers….”

Does this mean that we will all, when reading newspapers, have to read a story about a potentially interesting topic, written in 3 sentences, but with a very, very interesting (and small) picture connected to it? (presuming ofcourse, that the picture relates very remotely to one of the things mentioned in the article)

This sucks, mr. Garcia. This newspaper your company designed, sells because people like me don’t have the heart to say no to the poor woman (or man), who walks around all day freezing, trying to sell them, and make a dime or two.

So please, do us all a favour, and stop being so smart, and creating shitty-short-storied-fashion-dimpstick-fake-titties
movie-actresses-rock-pop-us-music-f-star kind of magazines. And as for the redesign of the Wall Street Journal you’re planning to do in the same style, remembering my own opinion on american media, i can only say “Just do it”!

Final quote:

“One scary bit for WSJ readers though: Garcia advocates more celebrity news and fashion/trend pieces. He says, “Younger readers want to read about fashion. They want to know which suit to buy. And if the Wall Street Journal doesn’t give them that, somebody else will…So let’s take the opportunity to really do it well.””

and a respond @ 37signals:

“Hmm. Gotta wonder if this approach will alienate the paper’s core audience. The WSJ means business. Its no-nonsense approach makes it almost the last media oasis from fashion advice and celeb gossip and I bet a lot of readers prefer it that way.”

To those interested, the article in wich He describes the ideas behind the design of 24sata