Berliner - thoughts
So, I thought rather than tossing off quick post this morning after the excitement of handing over my 95p to the guy in the newsagent, ready with my 5p change for the daily purchase of the Oxford Mail and the Guardian, I’d wait and try the paper out the way I normally would - G2 and supplement on the way to work, start the main paper on the way home, comment with coffee in front of Channel 4 news (still a luxury, Channel 4, even after a year back in England, purely because it’s not S4C).
Things I liked:
- the front page - undeniably stylish, and very different. Interesting use of space, too. I wonder if there will always be some sort of comment on the front?
- the palette - dark blue, orange, green, unexpected colours in unexpected places, not just in the photos
- five pages of comment! (oddly retitled as “comment and debate” rather than “comment and analysis”). At the end of the day, this is why I buy the Guardian. Hatters was on form today, Bunting pretty barking (but then using Frank Furedi as a source for anything discredits any argument, as far as I’m concerned)
- a letters page called “letters and emails” - hurrah, recognition that pens are for Christmas cards and meetings and shopping lists and little else
- the promise of a “response” column on the letters page, for newsmakers to come back on recent stories
- obituaries of ordinary people, submitted by readers
- a tiny G2 - perfect for reading on the bus
- the weekly graphic - today on the upcoming arms fair
- the been there section on the Travel website - it won’t surprise you to learn that I’ve been adding Philadelphia haunts
Things I’m not sure about:
- the size. Main news is clearly better than a broadsheet, but I wasn’t expecting the specialist sections to get bigger and thus become *more* inconvenient than their previous incarnation. Having said that, the Media does seem to have more of an identity when it’s not bundled in with the G2.
- the much-vaunted centrespread photo. Today’s was about the riots in Belfast, and was a good ten or fifteen pages removed from the stories about the issue. I can clearly see the value in doing something special with those colour presses and that centre page - but maybe it would be better for the striking photos of interesting stories whose value is the visual, perhaps accompanied by a nib?
- aside from the size, the G2. Maybe because it was substandard edition today - I mean, another interview with Oona King about life after Parliament? And another slightly-sceptical retrospective on Live8? - but I couldn’t get a handle on where I was in the section. And the new columnists are not appealing; I was excited to see a Germaine Greer column, but she was writing about steel, for some reasons. Opening it up to a page of shorts rather than the cover story was a jolt, but I daresay I’ll get used to it. Couldn’t find the telly at first, either.
- sport, daily. Waste of good paper. And the only useful use for it - keeping sport out of the news pages (cos it’s not) - won’t even apply tomorrow, because some cricketers have won something, apparently.
Jo’s back tomorrow. I think she’ll like it, once she’s got over her irritation at anything she likes changing, ever, and the jet lag of a six hour flight from Tel Aviv.
Anyone else got an opinion?
Overall I liked it, although I preferred the TV on the back.
Like you I am not so sure about the special sections being larger instead of smaller - but I only really read the Life and Friday review ones in any great detail anyway.
The sport section showed a good use of colour, being able to show little yellow and red dots against player names in the team lists to indicate if they got carded. Being able to use some colour-coding in tables will let them do a lot more. (Its NOT a waste of space! Tomorrow’s edition with a match report on West Ham’s trouncing of Aston Villa will be a thing of beauty)
Interesting how one story had words underlined which were explained in a box at the bottom. Just like hyperlinks. I almost tried clicking on them.
Mm, I wasn’t so enthusiastic on aesthetic grounds, but that might be influenced by my feeling that Simon Jenkins’ new incarnation as wide-eyed ranter just isn’t up to any broadsheet’s standard and by a suspicion that the Guardian chose the new size less because it was a good idea and more because it wasn’t the dreaded tabloid. There’s something ironic about such a rabidly anti-American paper being so obsessed by its size. Nonetheless, it’ll be interesting to see how their experience of the new size influences the content, and don’t be surprised if some of what you’ve mentioned here is mysteriously addressed in subsequent editions - I know you have more than one reader in the Graun’s newsroom.
Hi Skuds, funny how we’re absolute opposites - I always bin Life and Review immediately, and i’m yet to be persuaded of the value of sports coverage - I mean, surely if you’re serious about sports, you buy one of the tabloids for it? My brother moaned when my parents switched from the Mail to the Independent (yeah, I know, radical) because although there was just as much sport, there’s no transfer speculation, just news.
James, you’re clearly completely right that the Guardian wanted a different way, and that it’s European rather than American just fits right in. I know I’ve a reader at the Guardian - they last looked at the page at about half four this afternoon, but I’m sure it’s just some former OxStu hack looking up old uni friends!
Ah but… I work for a railway company. I have my choice of the Daily Mail, The Sun, The Sport and Metro if I want to look at tabloids.
There is actually an argument for sports sections becoming redundant when something like football365 exists on the Internet, but you could say the same about most of a newspaper. Sometimes I only buy a paper a couple of times a week and catch up on the internet. (With blogs helping to point the way to articles worth reading)
I think the new Guardian will suit my lifestyle the same way that the old one did. If I have little free time its easy enough to cherry-pick the most important parts, but if I have the luxury of more time there is enough to fill out whatever time I have - often I will mentally bookmark some piece to read the next morning at breakfast before leaving the house.
I’m still looking for the subtle humour in the sudoku though.
I don’t like the front page. Every story is incomplete, continued inside. Since I generally read the front page while walking to the bus stop, and am restricted to the bits I can read fully without opening the paper, I now have a bunch of frustrating snippets until the bus arrives. So, in that sense, it doesn’t suit my lifestyle, although I feel extremely uncomfortable about discussing whether or not a newspaper “suits my lifestyle”.
I am delighted someone else thinks Frank Furedi is barking. I find this more reassuring than I can possibly express.
He used to have a column in my union’s occasional magazine (probably still does, I’ve changed union) which was full of the sort of “right-thinking” stuff that is obviously problematic, periodically even verging on the fatuous, if you reading it whilst in any sense awake.
As an occasional reader of Le Monde, when feeling earnest about self-improvement and overconfident about my French, I’ve always liked their layout, and the Guardian (or is it now theguardian?) looks as if it seeks to be a more stylish and better designed version of the same. I think it’s lovely.
What odd bunch is he a member of? Used to be Marxism today, I think, now grouped around spiked magazine. Sort of elitist technocrats - always dismissing common concerns out-of-hand. I was wondering about how they move from the far left to the right with apparent ease, and Dan summed it up for me well: if you’re a member of an elite vanguard to provoke the revolution and think the working class doesn’t know what’s good for it, then it’s not such a great move to the right after all, is it?
Like you, I’m an occasional reader of Le Monde (mainly cos my favourite Oxford coffee shop gets it, and also because I’m snobbish about my advancing monolingualism), and would agree that theguardian is a thicker and better-quality version of that (and thank god today they seem to have remembered the importance of content in the G2).
The Spiked bunch are also grouped around the Institute of Ideas, who are sort of professional controversialists who are too fond of their own self-identified counter-cultural status to notice that most of their challenges to the status quo are actually formulations of the conventional wisdom with implicit exclamation marks and “look at me” flourishes. I’ve been to a few of their round-table discussions, which are quite interesting in an I-miss-university-seminars kind of way.