The death of the Pope and newspapers from another world

Without a shadow of a doubt, the headline that will go down in history on the day of Pope Francis's death will be the one that appeared in The reason In print Monday: "Pope Francis, resurrected: urbi et orbi and popemobile." It was written on Sunday, of course, but the cover artist didn't take any precautions and, when the newspaper hit the newsstands and the news broke early in the morning, that front page did become immortal. But, although it's not as spectacular as that mess, it still surprises me more than The Country and theAbcThis Tuesday, headlined "Pope Francis Dies," simply. These copies reached readers almost twenty-four hours after every digital outlet, radio station, television station, social media outlet, and WhatsApp group had commented on the news. I won't be the one to advocate for excessive sauce, but in this case, serving the news dry, without a sad accompaniment of interpretation or even poetry, strikes me as downright arrogant, as if the world hadn't evolved in recent decades and print newspapers were still the ones breaking the news.

When Michael Jackson died, the same thing happened. The vast majority of newspapers headlined "The King of Pop Dies" or some minimal variation on that idea. The Brazilian ExtraInstead, the cover was completely black, with the music star's name, the years of his birth and death, and one of his iconic white gloves breaking the mourning. The result was striking, beautiful, memorable. Sicily, entitled "The Pope of the Other World": winks at the intelligence of the reader, who senses that the other world to which the newspaper refers is not the celestial one, but that of the dispossessed, equally unnoticed by ordinary eyes.