What a treat to see the front page of the Frankfurter Allgemeine having fun with an old fashioned diamond heist, a forever alluring Marilyn Monroe, and turning yesterday’s story into today’s visual surprise (writes Mario Garcia). Bravo, FAZ.
Tuesday’s daring and Hollywood-style robbery of about $50 million worth in diamonds as they were loaded onto the cargo hold of a passenger airline at Brussels’ international airport was a breaking news alert beeping on our phones. A day later, it has made the front pages of many newspapers globally.
In most of these front pages, the story carries the usual elements: headline, quotes from airport officials, and the narrative of how the thieves dressed themselves as policemen, opened a hole thru a fence, entered the airport tarmac and walked away thru the same hole with their precious cargo, disappearing into the afternoon, and probably crossing all those no longer supervised borders between European countries. They remain at large.
The Frankfurter Allgemeine sets the example
One newspaper, however, managed to offer the visual surprise, with a very sweet, visually appealing and unexpected front page coverage of the story most of all knew about it by the time that front page was printed.
Germany’s Franfurter Allgemeine Wednesday edition was all black and white, mostly text and as classic as a Balenciaga dress, but offering the best visual coverage of this story – and , in the process, teaching us a valuable lesson about the way print newspapers should cover these breaking news that are “old” when they appear as ink on paper.
Indeed, on the FAZ’s front page, a photo of always popular and sexy Marilyn Monroe, dripping with diamonds, the ones she made forever popular in her Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend iconic rendition.
The FAZ ran a small headline over the Monroe photo that read: ‘Not only a girl’s best friend’.
That’s all it needed to say before it sent you to read the story of the diamond heist inside.
Doing print smartly and happily (it’s still possible)
Can newspapers still offer surprises? The proof is here.
Can newspaper editors turn their printed platform into a box of Godivas containing that unexpected, but welcome, coconut cream bonbon? The proof is here.
I imagine that many readers of other newspapers ignored the Brussels airport diamond robbery, of which they already knew all they cared to know, as they read headlines that sounded as if this was 1986 and mobile devices did not exist to tell us the moment events of this magnitude happened.
But one could not ignore the FAZ’s marvelously simple but fun treatment, Marilyn’s face with its eternal allure, and a headline that seduced you to go inside and read the story about which you already knew. Simply put: the FAZ editors had fun with this one, and they shared it with us.
Diamonds are still a girl’s (or a thief’s) best friend, but so are editors who think beyond the ordinary, who still have fun doing print happily and who, although they know their printed newspaper may have lost the time advantage to its digital siblings, continue to play in the sandbox with ink and paper, for which we are ever so thankful.
On days like this, we, too, believe that (smart and fun) print is as eternal as Marilyn Monroe.
Pictured: The one photo on the page dominates the top half of the front page for the Frankfurter Allgemeine
• Reproduced from the Mario Blog with permission