Evolving Times

I like the way The Times is becoming more serious.

The lead story today, for example, is the economy, no lightweight subject. The treatment is thorough with a good spread on pp 8 and 9. And the whole thing is extremely skillfully handled to make it as broad and accessible as possible. The packaging is good: case histories, Q&A, analysis. And therefore as night follows day the design is good too.

The single blurb on page one is thrillingly and daringly dull: an interview with Khaled Hosseini flagged with the words ‘The Book Seller’. Whoever wrote it should not shrink from doing something similar again. It is simple and understated, saying almost nothing about the piece inside except that there is an interview with a man who sells a lot of books. And the interview is good and interesting.

I like the idea of putting the briefs along the bottom and opening up the main page area. There is really no need to have a column of briefs down the side except that it adds an important vertical element to an otherwise cake-layered front page.

My only front page design reservation is the placing of the blurb above the masthead. I have always found it the hardest choice; far worse than which end of a boiled egg to crack open and far more worth going to war over. At various papers in very different circumstances I have tried above and below. In the end, after much deliberation, I have decided that blurb below is best.

The main reason, I always believed, for having the blurb above is that it somehow separated the bingo and the free packet of seeds from the beginning of the real paper. That was marked by the masthead, below which one gave readers a sense of real priorities.

In a previous incarnation I put the FT blurb above the masthead for similar reasons. Even though there was never any bingo in the FT, I still thought that a funny piece by Lucy Kellaway should be the other side of the title from the serious news coverage.

Now I think that was wrong and I am glad that Ryan and the new FT regime have moved the blurbs back below. First, no ordinary reader gets the message that above the masthead means somehow ‘not at the heart of what we are about’. So it is a semiotic redundancy. Second, where the paper is stacked in upright racks with other titles slightly below and in front, all you could see was Lucy Kellaway and not Financial Times.

Moreover, today I believe newspapers have to try as hard as possible to present themselves as a rich and varied mixtures. It is not news that sells newspapers. It is the quality of the mixture around the news: everything from the comment to the cut price plane tickets. The information and entertainment package that is The Times includes a whole lot more than news and by putting the masthead right at the top and then mixing the other elements of the front page below, you support that message.

Having the blurb at the top does slightly lessen the impact of the title and hint that I might buy the paper more for an interview with Khaled Hosseini than for the fact that it is The Times. For 90% of readers the opposite is likely to be the case. And anyway, a good interview with Khaled ‘the book seller’ has no diminishing effect upon the new, more serious, positioning of the paper.

Add comment April 11th, 2008