It’s that easy?

It’s not football-related, but, every year I’m very keen on following the news coming out of the TED Conference. Generally, if a story sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Still, this could be an interesting development.

But Utko has figured out a way for print to survive in the here and now, and that’s by making newspapers flashy and fun and cohesive. He thinks of the front page as a poster, and the full paper as a piece of music, with ups and downs that are tied together. Furthermore, during his redesign, he gets right into the workflow of the paper, figuring out how business can be integrated, rather than viewed as an afterthought.

His redesigns have not only won awards — his papers in Poland and Estonia each won best design in the world by the Society for News Design, an unheard-of feat for such small publishers — but they’ve also increased circulation significantly, as much as 100 percent for the Bulgarian paper he overhauled.

Huh

             

My suspicion is that the bigger problem remains figuring out how exactly to make money on the internet. Jack Shafer had an interesting take last month on how newspapers lost crucial early internet market share through a reluctance to innovate.