What it means to win

Europe's Best

Last week, a small delegation from The Mayo News travelled to Vienna to collect their award for Europe’s Best-Designed Local Newspaper 2007. Head of Design Fergus Kelly explains what it means to him

ON Tuesday morning I woke up late and hungover. Those that know me know there’s nothing unusual in that. This time though it wasn’t a damp day near Newport after a tough night putting a paper together. I was in Vienna and was late for Denise’s speech.
I saw the small lump of bronze beside me and smiled. A wide one at that. It’s a strange object, a melted, fluid combination of letter forms, elements of things that I use every day, supposedly showing the connectedness between type and the world somehow. Lost on me anyway, though to use one of Denise’s favourite words, it is pretty.
The previous evening we’d been presented with the award for Europe’s Best-Designed Local Newspaper and that was the small, but not insignificant, piece of metal beside me.
We’ve been working at it for five years now, starting with dramatic improvements in sport (Stevo and Mike, take a bow), and then our complete redesign in 2006. Last year we gave ourselves a target of three years to win the overall award. It only took one. We’re the first local paper from Ireland to win it. The first in English to win it. The smallest to win it.
The other major winners last week were from Germany, Spain and Greece, all of whom I met, along with others from Austria and Russia and a few closer to home (Laura and Sean Lynch of the WP keep the local rivalry strong). Language was a barrier, luckily for me dealt with brilliantly by the continentals. All were very interested in our paper. Most had won nothing and they wanted to know how we did.
In fact, a very cool guy from Wexford who is Creative Director for Welt am Sonntag in Germany came over to congratulate us. A fellow winner, he works with 30 other designers for a paper that sells 402,832 copies a week. He’d worked extensively with Mario Garcia, a god in newspaper design terms. Garcia’s designed 455 papers and counting and is nothing short of a genius.
They were all fascinated by our scale. In European terms we’re miniscule. We’re a tiny team of talented and dedicated individuals putting together a paper that only speaks to those from a small county on the western extremity of the continent.
To attempt to explain just how relatively small we are is difficult, but by way of example, the winners of our category last year were Hufvudstadsbladet from Finland. They sell 51,000 papers every day. Their team is more than double the size of ours. The Russian woman, Vera Kirunina, Editor of Sloboda in Tula near Moscow, had given a talk the previous day where she described her town of 500,000 people as small. That’s a population four times the size of Mayo’s or 100 times the size of Westport. I wonder how she’d have described Aughagower?
They were also amazed at the number of pages we produce, the sheer volume of content that we create ourselves, without the backing of a huge newspaper group or agency reports; the fact that virtually every word and picture is created by people from, or living in, this county; the fact that those words and pictures are only for people connected to the county. Those stories are sometimes for everyone in the county, sometimes for just a handful in some small townland west of Newport, and this is what sets us apart.

I’m guilty of considering the paper as a child, careful – to the point of obsession – that no-one hurt it, neglecting other, more important responsibilities to perfect it. I assume that Bronagh won’t be too pleased about the comparisons, but it’s now blossoming into a fabulous young adult, brimming with bright ideas and looking great. Along the way we’ve had our arguments and our joyous occasions but it was an awful lot of work. I was always careful that it wasn’t led astray by spur-of-the-moment ideas, but always tried to do my best to compromise for the greater good.
My colleagues may not share my enthusiasm for the ‘robust debate’ that producing the paper to the highest standards in the country every week can cause, but I think we all appreciate that only the highest standards and extreme attention to detail should be good enough.
And that’s the point I suppose. Though this is something that I treasure personally, it’s just not possible to do it alone. The input and influence of the other designers, in particular Shelly Gannon (and we haven’t forgotten you Cof!), the editors, the journalists and the (bigger, bolder) sales team (in that order obviously, John) comes through strongly. They are the people that provide us with the elements to build spectacular pages.
Most of you will not notice my work. If I’m doing it right you’ll usually just talk about that great story you read or how good those pictures of the match were. What I do blends into the background most of the time. You’ll probably not notice the 3.5mm baseline grid, the six columns for news layout and four for features. The consistency of the regular page elements and use of colour may have passed you by. And that’s before we start on the typography (though Cof’ll fill you in on that if you have a spare hour or two). But that’s how it’s meant to be.
The truly important thing in The Mayo News are the stories of the people of Mayo and if I can help you to understand them or make them more interesting or more fun I’ve succeeded.
I know it’s not Sam or an international airport in a boggy field, but it’s something for us all to be proud of. Only four newspapers have been singled out for the honour in each of four categories. A jury of peers has decided that your Mayo News is the best local paper in Europe.
Incidentally, I did make it to Denise’s speech on time. Thank goodness the earlier discussion at the European Editors’ Forum on Tibet and the Olympic Games had overrun (not like them to drone on…).  Unlike her counterparts, her speech was short and to the point and, unsurprisingly, it was excellent.