GAPA NEWS: Markus Gaertner's Asia Pacific Agency has a unique story.

After having been posted to Asia for eight years as a news correspondent, German business journalist and Weltreporter Markus Gaertner wanted to observe the booming continent between Singapore, Shanghai and Seoul from a different perspective. It had to be from the distance, from the other side of the Pacific Ocean. When he set up his new base camp in Vancouver in 2004, Markus wanted to travel in leading countries and markets on both sides of the Pacific. Vancouver was the city of choice, being the most "Chinese" town outside of the People´s Republic.

Readers in Europe were increasingly interested in both continents back then. But after the dot-com crisis a lot of advertisement left printed media for good and migrated to the internet, forcing many papers to scale down international sections. As a consequence, newspapers started to ask Markus to focus more on North America.

But he wanted to go on travelling to Asia and stay in touch with his "sources" and the development on the ground. In order to create alternative editorial outlets for his Far East stories, Markus started to launch new creative product lines. 

The most popular one - next to blogs and presentations - is the Gapa News ECONCHART line. It´s a series of infographs illustrating major developments in the three largest economic regions - Asia, the Americas and Europe - with all their intriguing aspects and complexities. With ECONCHARTS, Gapa News tries to be innovative, combining charts and explanatory text in a new way. The goal is to help people navigate in a world which is increasingly flooded with news and information - and lots of useless content.

Markus feels, he is uniquely qualified to be an economics graph editor. He studied economics in Munich, grew up in Europe, lived in Asia for eight years and returned to North America for a second posting in 2004. All his professional life he has been illustrating economic developments, just in words.

ECONCHARTS are sent out to our subcribers almost on a daily basis in a free-of-charge basic service that features most of the company´s infographs. You can either leave your email address with us to be added to the distribution list, or you might want to choose visiting our chart gallery at www.slideshare.net/markusgaertner and push the RSS feed button above the first row in order to get new charts delivered to your PC automatically.

We also produce ECONCHARTS on an individual basis for customers who want corporate or industry data illustrated for their websites, newsletters, presentations, corporate magazines or blogs. Every economic context or development that can be expressed in numbers, can also be illustrated. You´d be surprised ....