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Einstein got it right.

“Everything should be made as simple as possible but not simpler,” said the genius.

Unfortunately many newspapers tend to complicate simple things. I read a story in today’s Sydney Morning Herald by Annabel Crabb about Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull’s “disappearance” from the political scene.

It turned out that he had been on secret visit to Afghanistan with a key shadow minister and his deputy.

But her story was all of 495 words with zero information and 100 per cent opinion.

Keep It Simple, Stupid (Kiss) is a mantra journalists would do well to remember!

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Take a look at these two covers. Wouldn’t you agree that this is visual plagiarism of the worst sort?

The first is the February 2009 issue of Esquire magazine (US edition). And the second is the April 2009 issue of the Singapore edition of Smart Investor. The latter is published by the Lexicon Group which has other magazines in its stable.

The illustration from the Smart Investor is attributed to a “Kikoman” while the American work is by Shepard Fairey.

Take a closer look and you will notice that Kikoman has even stolen the colours, dividing the cover into two halves – red on the right and a different shade of blue on the left. The left side of Obama’s face too uses the same style, down to the right lines around the eyes.

Even the collar has the same style!

Kikoman ought to be sacked for daring to even use this image on the cover, unless of course he/the magazine had permission to adapt Fairey’s work, which I seriously doubt.

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K2 is the name of the highest peak on Mt Everest.

It is also the name I gave to a magazine published with Bhutan’s Kuensel newspaper.

The magazine was originally called City Bytes but Sonam Pelden who coordinates the section, says many readers call it Shitty Bytes.

This is the third week of its publication, and Sonam tells me it is getting rave reviews from readers and parents.

Here’s what City Bytes used to look like, and its replacement, K2.

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What newspapers come to mind when you read award citations such as the following:

“Immaculate work, measuring up to the highest standards ANYWHERE” (emphasis mine).

“Stunningly focused example of a paper designed for speed reading” (this about a newspaper with stories on ONE page measuring a total of nearly two metres long).

“Rigorous attention to detail and creative flair separate this paper from some very strong competition”.

“What a visual pleasure”.

“An exceptionally well-balanced newspaper”.

“Radiant colour pictures and aesthetics”.

You would think these would be some of the Top 10 newspapers in the world, wouldn’t you?

Wrong.

These award citations are for newspapers in a country not known for top quality newspapers internationally.

And that’s exactly where the problem lies.

Many national newspaper associations around the world regularly award prizes to newspapers based on a poor set of criteria and highly debatable standards.

The so-called experts called upon to judge many of these awards are often not journalists or have journalism backgrounds. In fact, many of them come from advertising backgrounds.

As a result, the “best” newspapers are lulled into thinking that they really are tops.

But pitched against the best in the world, these newspapers have utterly no chance of even winning consolation prizes. Some of these finalists were so bad they would not even be considered worthy of submission to an international competition.

National awards can therefore be very misleading indicators of how good a newspaper truly is.

Editors would do themselves and their readers a great service if only they would see what the best newspapers in the world are doing, rather than comparing their papers with those within their national boundaries.

Note to national newspaper associations: Elevating newspapers to such heights as described in the citations above only serve to stifle creativity and create a false sense of excellence.

After all, isn’t it part of the job of national associations to help newspapers improve?

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Bhutan newspaper Kuensel launched its daily edition in the most unusual manner. Well, at least to Western eyes.

It was a day-long affair, beginning at 4am when Bhutanese monks and priests started the religious rites of chanting, praying and making offerings.

The Chief Justice made a heartfelt plea for the media to respect its role as the fourth estate, saying it was its bounden duty to be the watchdog of democracy.

The paper is now available from Mondays to Saturdays with both the Zhongkha (the Bhutanese language) and English editions merged into one. The Zhongkha edition starts on the back page but is printed upside down with the English edition on the other side.

Kuensel had printed about 10,000 copies of the new paper and sales were beyond expectations, said its managing director Chencho Tsering.

The paper hopes to increase its number of pages in the next few months.

Kuensel’s dragon (a symbol of Bhutan, also known as the Land of the Thundering Dragon) was a saga that would take a few days to resolve.

After 10 different versions were drawn by different artists, we finally settled on one that would appear in the paper’s masthead only four days after the launch. The version you see below is the eighth dragon but was deemed too skinny and didn’t quite represent the prosperity of Bhutan!

Which brings me to the question of mastheads.

As with mastheads or nameplates, as some call it, there is always a great division. There is the old school which does not want any change, and the other that says we should change with the new look.

I am of the latter school, having changed mastheads at many newspapers, including that of the world’s biggest vernacular paper, the Malayala Manorama, which I redesigned some years ago.

I had the old typeface redrawn and even reworked the elephant, removing all the fine detail and making it slightly more stylistic.

At every one of these papers, there was not one single objection from readers! It was only a handful of journalists (mostly senior editors and long-time employees) who felt they had to retain a bit of the past!

My feeling is that people often mistake the look of the masthead as “branding” whereas it is actually the name and how the paper markets itself.

Your views?

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Isn’t it amazing that in the small landlocked kingdom of Bhutan, there are four English-language newspapers?

Kuensel, the oldest of the four, is a bi-weekly but launches its Monday-Saturday edition from April 27 with a spanking new design which I have done. Bhutan Today is the only other daily and the other two are weeklies. Kuensel is partly owned by the government and the rest were set up by private enterprises.

With a population of just 691,000 spread out over 47,000 square kilometres (bigger than Denmark, nearly as big as Spain and half the size of the state of Indiana in the USA), the fact that there are four English-language newspapers is even more amazing.

Bhutan’s newspaper circulation is obviously not large. Kuensel sells about 15,000 copies and limits itself to just 16 pages most of them in black and white.

The papers are chock-a-block with ads, a far cry from the decline in advertising revenues for newspapers in the western world. Better still, circulation is growing, which explains why there are new entrants such as the Bhutan Observer and Bhutan Today.

For more update on the situation in Bhutan, check out this blog in the weeks to come.

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I love these two quotes intended for those who think they can write or wish to write.

The first is from Cicero, one of the greatest minds of the ancient world. Here’s what he had to say to the philosophers, statesmen, lawyers and the people of ancient Rome:

For a man to commit his thoughts to writing when he can neither arrange them nor bring any new light to bear upon them, and indeed, when he has no attraction whatsoever to offer to his reader, is a senseless waste of time, and of paper, too.

The second is from Elmore Leonard, the American author who has written nearly 40 books, some of which have been turned into movies (such as 3:10 to Yuma).

My most  important piece of  advice to all you would-be writers: when you write, try and leave out all the parts readers skip.

If only journalists had heeded these words, readers wouldn’t have taken flight en masse!

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Take a look at this rack of newspapers and magazines at Jakarta’s Soekarno-Hatta airport taken yesterday.

Which of the magazines or the papers do you think the casual buyer will pick? And how do you think he makes his decision?

If you think the buyer would pick Newsweek and the Jakarta Globe, you are absolutely right.

Buyers are usually attracted to a product, or any product for that matter, first of all by its design.

Newsweek has a very effective cover with the word, BUY, in caps and big, bold type on a bright yellow background while the Jakarta Globe looks a lot more classy than The Jakarta Post.

Colour experts know that yellow is a very powerful colour which can be spotted from a long way away. The reader’s eye will always be attracted to the colour no matter what. And besides, the headline is very simple, clear and powerful especially because of the current economic crisis.

So despite being tucked behind BusinessWeek and Time magazines and slightly overlapped by the bold red cover of Fortune, Newsweek still stands out by the sheer power of yellow.

As for the Jakarta Globe, a recently-launched broadsheet in Jakarta designed by James de Vries, it is clearly streets ahead of the boring design of the Jakarta Post although it looks like a cross between the UK’s Daily Telegraph and The Guardian, down to the space between the lead headline and the start of the story.

The Post looks distinctly old-fashioned with the badly done typewriter-style masthead. Placed next to the Globe, it tells the reader “we’re old, tired and boring”.  I wonder why editors at the Post refused to change the masthead when it recently redesigned.

The Globe’s dual-colour masthead, on the other hand, says it is a more modern paper than the Post. The colour skybox above the masthead adds another dimension.

As for the content, it has fallen into the classic new newspaper trap. With acres of space due to the lack of advertising, it has resorted to large photos (sometimes bloody awful ones) and very lengthy stories. More often than not, there are three or four stories to one blank page!

There is little by way of other story-telling devices which research shows help readers understand stories a lot better, and originality of ideas. There is a daily Eye Witness page with HUGE (and I mean huge) photos, a rip-off from NRC Next, The Guardian and lots of other papers. On Saturday, there were two pages devoted to Eye Witness.

And oh, the name Eye Witness has been used to death.

I said to someone in Jakarta I would give the Jakarta Globe two years max to get a steady stream of revenue before the billionaire owner James Riady pulls the plug because no matter how deep one’s pocket is, there comes a time when commonsense (which isn’t very common) takes over from pride (which apparently is why he wanted to have an English-language paper, rather than altruistic reasons).

But I hope the Globe makes it because the newspaper industry in Indonesia badly needs a shake-up.

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Do newspapers truly, fully, completely, unmistakably understand their readers?

I dare say the answer is no. But few will readily admit that.

If they did, newspapers would not be in the kind of trouble they are in now.

Consider today’s issue of Weekend Argus, a broadsheet in Cape Town owned by Tony O’Reilly’s Independent Newspapers Ltd.

Spread across seven columns on the top of Page 1 is a story that is more than 24 hours old – “Tsvangirai injured, wife killed in car crash” it says in 48 pt bold.  The trouble is that the crash took place on Friday morning and was the top breaking news all over radio and television and the internet all day.

Tens of thousands of readers would have known about how a truck crashed head-on into the car carrying Zimbabwe’s Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai and his wife to a rally in his hometown.

But Weekend Argus added absolutely nothing new to the story. No graphics, no photos, no new information, no nothing!

But that is typical of many newspapers today. Editors are remiss to ignore the impact of radio, TV and the internet on how they should treat the news, especially in such an important story as this.

What should have been in the next day’s news? How about graphics of how the accident happened? Where was Mrs Tsvangirai seated? Was there any suspicion of foul play? Perhaps even speculation that this could be an attempt on the life of the new Prime Minister? And a whole lot of other questions….

I wonder what Editor Chris Whitfield was thinking about when he decided to run this story with absolutely nothing new.  Did he expect all or most of his readers NOT to have known about it and therefore thought it necessary to publish the story as if it was being reported for the first time?

If that were so, I’m afraid he is living in the dark ages!

The same can be said of The Times, a tabloid which carried a story about Australia’s cricket team playing a Test match with South Africa in Durban.

The headline on the back page of The Times on Monday March 9 said: “Hughes piles on the agony, makes history.”

Very outdated, I must say.

Yesterday, at the hotel lobby, there were lots of people watching the match. During the day, radio had a live commentary and the news was on TV in the evening.

Everyone knew that Phillip Hughes had made a historic double century during this Test and that South Africa was in trouble.  Yet the paper saw it fit to run the story as if no one knew about it.

Is it any wonder that newspaper circulations are dropping?

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How many newspaper readers can be considered diehards?

Here’s definitely one:

While checking in at Johannesburg’s new airport last week, I caught sight of this man reading the Daily Star, an English broadsheet.

The man, who looks to be in his 50s, stood in the middle of  the walkway engrossed in the paper which he had folded into half, most likely because South African broadsheets are huge, measuring 55cm in height and 36 wide.

He read the story, turned the page and continued looking at his paper for more than five minutes, undeterred by the noise and the people walking by.

This is the type of reader all newspapers would love to have.

In my travels, I love taking pictures of people reading or not reading newspapers. Most of them have been people in their 40s and above and males. Sadly, very very few are people in their 20s or 30s.

No prizes for guessing why.

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