Charles Apple

Welt am Sonntag, a 400,000-circulation Sunday paper based in Berlin, Germany, launched a giant e-magazine today. One that readers will be asked to pay in order to access.

And it’s very cool. Or, at least, it looks cool in the promotional video. This alone is enough to merit your attention for a few moments:

But in addition to the e-publication itself, there is a powerful, powerful lesson here in why it’s important for designers to be proactive in pitching and selling those far-out, wacky gee-we’ve-never-done-it-this-way-before ideas they might have.

The e-project was designed by Jördis Guzmán Bulla, art director of Welt am Sonntag. She won a gold medal for design portfolio in 2007 from the Society for News Design and the society named her paper one of the World’s Best Designed earlier this year.

Jördis Guzmán Bulla
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A press release from Welt am Sonntag’s parent company, Axel-Springer states (via an extremely rough translation by Google) that the new e-magazine will feature:

Stories from all departments [of the print edition of the paper will be] complemented with animated graphics, video clips and audio contributions.

Welt am Sonntag never had a web presence before. But it does now — and that’s where the online magazine lives. Access to the magazine will cost 1.50 Euros. But an access code printed in each Sunday’s paper will give a reader access to the online edition.

In addition, potential e-readers can see a brief preview for free — typically, a title page, a contents page and one page of editorial content.

OK, those are the nuts and bolts. So here’s the part where the lesson comes in…

We hear the e-magazine was developed in-house in less than eight weeks. But, even more extraordinarily, the project came about after it was proposed by Jördis herself.

On Sept. 11, Mathias Döpfner — the CEO of Axel-Springer — held what he called a “Day of Ideas.” He invited staffers to sign up for ten-minute, one-on-one sessions to pitch any new ideas to him.

Jördis had an idea for an e-magazine. She developed a working Flash prototype and presented it to Döpfner during her session.

Within an hour-and-a-half, Döpfner had invited her to give her presentation again — directly to the company’s board of directors.

Our source tells us:

I must say, this is a pretty brilliant and unheralded concept for a guy who runs a shop with more than 3,000 employees and a suite of media companies in 35 countries. Imagine the layers of middle manager naysayers he short-circuited in the process!

Just 20 days after those presentations, Jördis was named project manager. She worked with an editor and three free-lance Flash designers who set about developing a user interface and producing editorial multimedia content.

Our source tells us:

The best analogy is that they had to design Springer’s version of the iTunes store.

The project launched today.

Find more background on Jördis Guzmán Bulla here.

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 21st, 2009 at 6:42 pm and is filed under Innovative ideas, International newspapers, Web news design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.