Supplements
The supplement as a reaction to declining sales was initially an Italian and Spanish idea. When newspapers started to offer DVDs and books, Gianni Agnelli, then publisher of La Stampa, commented, “This is not a solution. It reminds me of the people that stay on their toes in order to better see a show. This way they fake they are taller, but they will not be able to last long”. In the words of Sabadin, “the strategy of supplements transformed the kiosks into bazaars” and distorted the sales figures. Worse, the initial good results provided newspapers with an alibi for not changing. Now the presence of a supplement does not have the positive effects on sales that it once did, and the time has come to “change or die”, as Rupert Murdoch says.  

Format and design
The idea of reducing the format of the paper is allegedly due to an intuition that struck Independent editor Simon Kelner in a supermarket in 2003, while noticing the different dimensions of toothpaste tubes. First the Independent and later the Times halved their format, and continued selling the broadsheet version in parallel for a while, in a view to having the readers decide which was better. The public made its choice and preferred the smaller version of the papers, and the newspapers around Europe began adapting to the new trend. The next evolution of the print press was the adoption of full colour. Nowadays, when a newspaper reduces its format, it also normally undertakes a complete redesign. The most successful operations of this kind have been proved those of newspapers which radically changed their ways together with the new design. The redesign needs to be an occasion to adapt to the new reality: when it makes it into newspapers, the news is not new to the reader anymore. The Independent and the Guardian in the UK are examples of papers that deliver mostly analysis to their already informed reader.

Adapting to the needs of the reader: immigrants
Newspapers published in countries with strong immigration understood that it is vital to publish a version of the paper in the local minority’s language. However, simply translating the original articles is not a solution. For example North American newspapers that publish a Spanish version, are successful when they cover specific issues of the immigrants’ community on the front page and hire freelancers who write from South America.

Local coverage: web
A good local website is the key to success for a local paper: in fact, the local and national editions of the same paper should have separate websites. Local papers cannot lose the opportunity that the web represents in order to really be connected to their public and its needs. Creating blogs and forums and stimulating the participation of the local community in the process of editing the paper, can result in the transformation of the papers’ website into a sort of virtual village square. When this happens, the paper gets to collect classifieds, which according to a piece of analysis from Google are likely to represent the strongest growth in terms of web advertisement revenues in the near future.

Integrated Newsrooms
The process of integrating the online and the print newsrooms is a necessary choice for newspapers that want to fully explore the possibilities of the web. It is important to have the staff get directly involved in the choice, in order to minimize discontent and adjustment issues. For the same reasons problems of hierarchy between online and print editors need to be addressed and solved at the very beginning. A good solution comes from the experience of the Toronto’s Globe and Mail and its 'Reimagination' initiative. The whole 225-person newsroom was invited to provide the paper with strategies for successfully entering the digital age. 160 employees participated in Reimagination, and 20 of the ideas that resulted were put into place.  

The new journalist
Sabadin decided to write about the future of the newspaper after a lesson he gave to the students of “Science of Communication” at the University of Turin in 2006. “During my lesson I realized that those students were being coached to work in a newspaper that does not exist anymore. Many of their professors were retired journalists, who knew – and taught – little about new media”.
“If I were a young journalist today I would learn photography, web site management and filming. A printed paper delivers the news in the same way a car brings you from A to B. Online coverage can be like travelling in a helicopter: you have a much broader view and you can land where you like. The new journalists must be able to drive those helicopters”.

The future of the newspaper
The newspapers that will last the longest will be quality ones. They will be free on weekdays and will be double today’s price on weekends. They will contain less pages and concentrate on analysis. Their journalists will be investigative reporters, who will get out of the “paddocks of press conferences, where everybody gets the same news delivered in the same way”.

“But in the end the printed newspaper will disappear”. Sabadin considers that journalism, just like music, will survive the change of medium, and that this is all that counts. “I listened to  LPs in the 70s, than I switched to CDs, and I now have a MP3 reader. Music did not die in the meantime". "Good journalism will stay a fundamental need of civil and democratic societies, and that is why it will find a way to adapt and survive”.

Source: Interview with Vittorio Sabadin 

See also: Corriere della Sera (in Italian), La Stampa (in Italian)