Designing ones way out of Meedja meltdown

Stowe Boyd writes about the strategy of a Portuguese newspaper called "i", which is structuring itself differently:

"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.

This is how it is structured:

- 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.

Or "Think, Know, Understand, Feel". Be interesting to see how it pans out. Reminds me of the TED talk in Long Beach earlier this year when Jacek Utko showed how restructuring a newspaper's look and feel drove a major increase in sales (see embedded video)