It was difficult to imagine in January that in a year with
presidential elections in the United States and the Olympic Games in Tokyo
, to mention just two events of global impact, the protagonist of the year would end up being an invisible pathogen.
The
Covid-19
, when he became a pandemic, took the news focus politicians, athletes and virtually anyone not frontline combat against the virus.
So the question arose early:
how do you report something in a newspaper that you can't see ... and that also kills?
Well, assuming that each page, from cover to cover, is a challenge.
Squeezing all - absolutely all - the possibilities offered by a photo, a graphic, a cartoon, the typographic resources or the blank space itself.
And, of course, looking for news and approaches.
As
Miguel Ángel Jimeno
, professor at the
University of Navarra
and print media analyst,
likes to say
, "without journalism there would be no design, there would be decoration."
Jimeno is a member of the jury for the
ÑH Awards
, which have just recognized EL MUNDO as the best designed national newspaper in 2020 in
Spain, Portugal and Latin America
, ahead of La Nación (Argentina).
"This is great news for all of us who make EL MUNDO", points out
Francisco Rosell
, its director.
"It is a knock in some very difficult conditions derived from the health crisis, which have even forced us to do the newspaper with no one physically in the newsroom itself.
What the Design team headed by Rodrigo Sánchez has achieved is something extraordinary
."
The prize awarded by the
Society for News Design Spain (SND-E) and the SND Sudamérica
appreciates EL MUNDO's effort to provide its readers with information with its own personality and in the most visually attractive way, at the opposite end of the pages of catalog that make one section or a supplement indistinguishable from another.
Hence, the ÑH award has also resulted in 35 bronze, 8 silver and 1 gold medals, awarded to interviews, reports and analyzes published in
Papel, DXT, Salud, Crónica, Spain
...
And among so many iconic pages, one that stands out from the rest: the cover of Wednesday, April 8.
"For me, the great milestone of this year is to have published on the front page the photo of the coffins of the Ice Palace", explains Rosell.
"There was a deliberate will that there should be no images of a tragedy in which almost 70,000 people have died. Having achieved it seems to me to be
the main service we have done to readers and to
Spanish
society
."
Rodrigo Sánchez: "Dedicating yourself to design in the press is like going back to the craft of journalism"
The topic of the conductor does not serve to portray the
head of Art at EL MUNDO
, who also devises a new supplement that adjusts a headline.
The award reinforces its commitment to design with character.
Professor Miguel Ángel Jimeno says that in this journalistic design "if you do it wrong, you will starve; and if you do it right, you have options not to starve."
A
Rodrigo Sánchez
, journalist and art director of El Mundo, likes to
gamble every day that client as the barber hiccup joke.
Customize each information.
Be unpredictable even to himself.
What does making a newspaper in 2020 consist of? Going against the current.
In being attractive enough for someone to walk over to a kiosk, stop checking your cell phone and give you half an hour or an hour of their time.
The printed products of the great Spanish newspapers are the true premium product, the one that is made with the most care within a newsroom.
Which does not mean that it is more important than digital, because it offers an obvious informative immediacy and an audiovisual richness that paper can never compete with.
Dedicating yourself to this is almost like going back to the craft of traditional journalism.
We are the last Gutenberg stronghold of journalistic companies. You turned the covers of the supplement 'Metrópoli' (later 'La Luna de Metrópoli) into collector's items.
What characterizes EL MUNDO in terms of design?
From the beginning with its first Art Director, Carmelo G. Caderot, and later with me, we have always had a quality mark, a very careful journalistic product.
We have turned 30 years old and we have always been at the top of the rankings and in international design competitions.
Now what we want is to transfer that to web design.
They are different platforms and products that have different graphic needs, we are going to try to intoxicate the other with one part so that they have the same level of excellence.How do the tux, that careful design you allude to, coexist in the same closet, and it sucks Spiked leather, that is, the 'punk' vocation?
Mixing in the world of fashion has been around for a long time.
Balenciaga probably already had that in mind.
Or Dior. Then there have been great designers -Galliano, Gaultier, Moschino ...- who have mixed a lot the elegant, the informal and the transgressive.
We are not going to compare ourselves with them because we do journalism, but we can say that the role of a designer and an art director is to try to convey information so that it reaches the reader in the clearest and most attractive way possible.
We have been learning to make design on paper for many years and it is a pity that just when we are doing the best it is perhaps when it is least important. How has the pandemic affected Design work?
It has been a great handicap because a designer needs a fairly close contact with the writer to do his job.
Working remotely, using WhatsApp, emails and phone calls has slowed down the process.
However, I think at the same time it has allowed us to reinvent ourselves more quickly.
The redesign of EL MUNDO, which we already had ready before the pandemic and with which we came out coinciding with the state of alarm, served us as a life hook.
We hold on to him to do the job with more enthusiasm.
Never before in Spain had there been an attempt to make a newspaper with the ambition of being a Sunday newspaper.
And do it, in addition, in the worst possible conditions.
From the first month, we have been doing better, more relaxed and with more determination. How did the reader receive this commitment to double speed: immediacy from Monday to Friday and reflection at the weekend?
I think he has accepted the product quite well, being strange to Spanish society, to ourselves as professionals and to the company, which also got into a garden.
Of course, the ÑH award encourages us to continue and to want to do better.
What pages come to mind when you take stock of these last months?
The special number that we did when the 100 days of the state of alarm were fulfilled, which more or less brought together all the journalistic and aesthetic knowledge that we had learned during hard confinement.
And then there has been a section, which has been Sunday Paper, in which we have tried to give each double page a character that distinguishes it from the rest. Does it make sense to dedicate so many resources to making a paper newspaper when it seems that about it, As an object of consumption, almost as a fetish, do the trumpets of the Apocalypse sound?
All the effort that the professional of a journalistic medium makes for a reader is little. How was the cover of April 8, the one with the image of the coffins, made? The moment we had the photo we knew that it was going to generate a controversy tremendous.
I think our mission as journalists is to spread the truth, and that image was a crude, very crude truth.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
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