Case Studies - E Polis
Milan, Italy
Beyond Syndication.
Innovate without running after new media at any cost but reinventing your own vision and way to look at “the printed paper”.
E Polis: a challenge that’s been won and that sets a new relevant milestone in the Italian and international daily market. The printed newspaper can still be a most profi table business.
In the beginning
E Polis is probably the most innovative publishing group to make it on the Italian newspaper scene. Nichi Grauso, the Italian media tycoon known for his innovative ideas and the speed with which he catches the wave of change, fi ne-tuned the project between 2000 and 2004, the year when the fi rst daily title of the group went live.
Mr Grauso is not a newcomer to this kind of venture. Founder of one of earliest Italian “private” radio stations, immediately followed by a commercial TV channel, Nichi Grauso meets the press when he decides to buy the Unione Sarda, the number one regional in Sardinia (Italy).
To the Unione Sarda, Grauso adds another paper, the Polish daily Zycie Warszawy, followed by the acquisition of a TV channel, also in Poland.
Meanwhile he comes across the early Internet, immediately understanding its huge potential. With the help of a team of experts, Grauso studies and acquires Video On Line, the first Italian Internet provider that was completely free - a project that the Italian tycoon replicates in several countries across Northern Africa and in Albania. Video On Line (VOL) is then sold to the Italian telephone company Telecom that converts it into its national portal, TIN.it. After the VOL adventure, Grauso decides to take some time to rest and study the changing world of media, only to come up with the innovative project of E Polis, with which to challenge the Unione Sarda and the whole of the traditional Italian press - to use a word dear to Grauso himself.
The Italian scenario
The Italian market is characterised by two signifi cant aspects: the news stands as the exclusive channel of distribution, and the presence of adverting agencies, companies that operate outside the publishers and that sell the advertising space.
In 2004, the state of the Italian editorial market did not differ much from the rest of Europe, and the Italian publishers, along with their international counterparts, were facing a double challenge: both readership and advertising revenue were falling.
In the struggle to fi ght the loss of readers who abandoned the printed paper for other alternative media, such as radio, TV and the Internet, publishers tried to react with a heavy use of products distributed with the paper itself, such as CDs, DVDs, books, and other collectibles.
Then they tried with the full colour paper, but this only partly satisfi ed the advertising buyers, who had become more demanding in terms of segmentation of the audience and potential to reach it.
In this scenario Nichi Grauso launched the fi rst local title of his newspaper group, Il Giornale di Sardegna, a 64-page tabloid paper distributed daily in the metropolitan area of Cagliari, Sardinia.
To win the competition, Grauso adopted a modern and accurate graphic layout for the paper and a distribution that mixed traditional news stand sale, at a discounted price, and the free-paper route, in some of the most relevant areas of the city.
The results were positive: the readers became loyal to the new title and the advertising buyers chose the paper for its large circulation.
The modern layout was immediately appreciated by the younger readers. “We took care in every single detail of the project,” says Antonio Cipriani, chief editor of the group “so that when we went live with the fi rst issue in October 2004, we were already clear on most of the fundamental aspects of how we saw newspapers.
“Our newspaper has been studied to win the fi delity of the reader: we gave more room to sections dedicated to in-depth analysis on the daily themes.
Then local news and sports had another major role, with culture.
To achieve this, we created a network of contributors to meticulously cover the region, so that we could work with fresh news and we gave our readers the chance to send us their feedback by mobile phone and text messages.”
After a year organising the newsroom and designing an even fresher graphic, Il Giornale di Sardegna, (September 2005) split and Grauso launched two separate titles Il Nord Sardegna and Il Sud Sardegna, with the geographic description that embeds in the mastheads.
“When we changed the name of the paper we decided to follow the hint that was coming from our readers: they were already calling it “Il Sardegna”, the shorter version of its name,” continues Cipriani. “We immediately liked it and we decided to make it become the trademark of the group.”
Il Nord e il Sud Sardegna share the regional and national pages, while the local news is produced at the three local newsrooms - Cagliari, Olbia and Sassari.
The controlover the two editions is provided by a Central Desk in Cagliari - a structure that was to become pivotal in the development of the forthcoming E Polis group. Also, the graphic appeal was given a major restyling.
Sergio Juan, of the world-famous Argentian graphic fi rm, Cases i Associats, studied the final layout. “It was then that I actually had a clear vision of the whole E Polis project,” confi rms Nichi Grauso. “E Polis in Greek means the cities,or the towns - it refl ects our firm intention to base our papers in the towns of the Italian provinces. Our country formed around the Comuni, the free-cities of the Middle Age, natural expansion of the familes [...] it is there, in the heart of the towns, that we will fi ght our battle against the traditional press.”
With a frantic schedule, one site followed the previous one, and so, in the spring of 2006, the group launched eight new daily titles Il Padova, Il Treviso, Il Venezia, Il Mestre, Il Vicenza, Il Verona, Il Brescia, Il Bergamo, followed by Il Firenze - the first title in a large city - and E Polis Milano and E Polis Rome, to cover the two most
important cities of the country.
The last two titles help the group daily circulation grow to one million copies per day - in a country where the top-selling national newspaper reaches about 900,000 copies.
An innovative project
A few guidelines may sum up the highlights of the E Polis project. The main goal was to produce a series of local titles able to be closer to the readers and to the local advertiser, who otherwise has no interest in buying into the national press, due to dispersion of the ‘local’ message and to an unaffordable rate.
The product, meanwhile, had to be premium, in terms of quality, to overcome the psychological obstacle of the free distribution, often linked to low-quality press by both readers and advertisers.
Once the pilot newspaper was out it was only a matter to replicate it to a similar market - i.e. a neighboring town - in order to multiply the advertising spaces without multiplying the editorial production costs. The success of the operation was based on strict organisation. All the production parameters, that usually are left free, such as the number of pages, the advertising load, the advert positions, page scanning, and graphic layout were ruled by rigid industrial logics. The level and nature of the technology used made it possible to apply such a high standard.
The Structure
E Polis is organised as one large newsroom deployed across the country, where 10 local newsrooms report to a centralserver farm, housing all the IT infrastructure.
The structure comprises 90 journalists, fi ve graphic designers and seven staff from the IT department.The group counts 15 daily titles with almost 1,000 pages produced every night - 400 unique and 200 of advertising or special sections (weather, horoscope, TV guides, ets); the rest is left to local news.
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The E Polis Group - A Case Study