i = Future Of Newspapers = Think, Know, Understand, and Feel

Interesting piece about a Lisbon-based online newspaper that is turning the design of papers upside down.

[via www.editorsweblog.org]

What i is doing differently

I is not structured like a traditional paper. The paper’s team worked with media consultancy Innovation to come up with a new way to organise the product. “Our feeling was,” said Figueiredo, who came on board at an early stage, moving from Diário Económico, “that people were not concerned about traditional sections any more. Traditionally, journalists have to fill a politics section even if there is nothing relevant going on in politics. We wanted to come up with something different.” So the team came up with five key needs that they wanted the paper to address, with five key words.

1. Opinion is the first section of the paper, based on the key word think. No other Portuguese paper starts out with opinion.
2. Radar is the second, accompanied by the key word know. Figueiredo said the assumption was that readers will already know a lot from other sources, but Radar aims to offer a quick overview of everything that has happened in the past 24 hours. The section is eight pages long, and the longest article is half a page.
3. Zoom is the third section, connected to the key word understand. The 22-26 page section looks at between eight and 13 topics in depth, with articles taking up one to ten pages. “We deal with these subjects with a lot of care, and we use the best teams,” Figueiredo said.
4. The fourth section is called More, linked to the key concept feel. This is where anything about people’s private, cultural, social lives goes. Figueiredo explained that the team did not want to give the section a more specific name, or the content would be limited. More encompasses the fifth need that the paper wanted to address: sports, about 80% of which is focused on football - “this is very important in Portugal,” Figueiredo said.

I love it. The sections of the paper are Think, Know, Understand, and Feel.