Background

Since its first edition in 1838, The Times of India has been the oldest, largest selling and among the most influential English-language daily newspapers in India. The paper detected a stagnant or falling readership of some of its pages.

Strategy

The sports pages of a newspaper must compete with digital news and tv. We re-considered the role of a sports page: it is to provide analysis, and a rich re-telling of a sporting competition with a detail that cannot be absorbed in the heat of love viewing.

Solution

The Times Sports page dramatizes the game, condensing it into a storyline with the depth of statistics matching tv but readable at leisure. Thanks to the pervasive influence of digital sports coverage, far richer data sets are available to describe a game that at any time in the past. Moves, when they occured, are available; the challenge is to interpret them and extract the pattern of the game as a story, capturing the turning points.

Capitalizing on ‘dead’ areas, we introduced augmented scoreboards, an exciting composition of pictures with augmented narrative graphics focusing on the action or moment photographed for a hit of adrenaline-reliving the moment.

The infographics and masthead colors are from the tournament for relating it better with live matches; overall, a disruptive experience at the back end of the paper.