Infographics departments around the world: RCS Quotidiani, Italia (Corriere della Sera, La Gazzetta dello Sport)

Working on an infographics department in Italy is hard. Not just because you would prefer being on the streets, staring the monuments or eating pasta with Lasmbrusco. The proble is that the people that work on these departments are not considered journalists, and writers and editor take decissions about the way the graphic is done. We complain a lot about this kind of things in Spain, but we must recognize that the problem is much bigger in Italy.
Anyway, some people manage to do some good things despite all these problems. Even winning some international awards. This happens on RCS, the most important journalistic enterprise of Italy. The departed, commanded by Marcello Valoncini, is on charge of the infographics for Corriere della Sera (the biggest political newspaper of the country) and La Gazzetta dello Sport (the biggest sports newspaper too). Marcello has, on his own words, a young and motivated team. And now, I let him speak:



Our department has 15 people on the infographics staff, fr both newspapers. We work on different shifts to cover form 14.00 to 01.30. We have three great illustrators and the rest of the department has a good creatve capacity. We don't work for the web, so our works can't be watched online.
As you could understand, this is going one step behind the spanish or american newspapers.




From 2005, Corriere della Sera (founded at 1876) arrives to the newsagents with a full color edition, which have meant big changes on our traditional newspaper, which is more than 130 years old: we changed the page format, the fonts and the text size. A new font has been created, the Solferino, exclusive for us. The pagination has been also absolutely changed. We've created a new section, with in-deep features, called 'Focus', where graphics have a big importance. Readers have liked it very much.




La Gazzetta dello Sport (founded at 1896) has also suffered a big transformation this march: new format, smaller, new pagination and new fonts too. I personally creatd a style handbook for the sports newspaper. It could help to keep the same style on different graphics.




And, as signature of the graphics here shown, here you are all the people that works on RCS infographics department:
- Marcello Valoncini (Chief of infographics)
- Pierluigi Serena (Deputy chief)
- Andrea Venier (Deputy chief)
- Sabina Castagnaviz (illustrator)
- Nicolas Vargas (illustrator)
- Dario Arcidiacono (illustrator)
- Marco Maggiori
- Ade Rana
- Cristina Pirola
- Sara Caffulli
- Franco Sturino
- Franco Amici
- Massimiliano Aliberti
- Roberto Sotera
- Gianfranco Giudici