Helping Roger

There was much free advice for Roger Alton around the media pages this weekend. Some of it was in his old paper The Observer yesterday, some in The Guardian today. I trust he will sensibly ignore it all and get on with the job. But it is irresistible to add to it - especially since, unlike Mr A, we don’t have to risk our necks by actually doing it.

Contrary to those who think The Independent should go free, we think it should get more expensive. (And this is despite our general excitement about the free papers). With full colour presses coming on-stream in September, why not lead the way yet again and declare the newspaper dead and buried. And no, don’t transfer the whole thing to the web and go 100% digital. Launch a daily magazine instead.

At least, this is how we would market it. The reality is not that shocking and surely would not dangerously ruffle the daily 134,000 full-price loyalists that the Independent currently commands. The paper is already half magazine. The famous ‘viewspaper’ covers are straight from the magazine world. The consumery parts (50 best etc) and the promotions (mini-books) would sit comfortably in many a magazine package.

However there is a lot more that could be done. You could first of all drop the idea of covering news at all, at least in the conventional way. Instead you could transfer 85% of the staff to features duties and retain 15% to provide an excellent and intelligent news aggregation service that would be printed, say, in a single column on page one and then, perhaps, in a 16 page outer section with 8 pages of international and national briefings at the front and 8 pages of business and sport at the back. There would be no pretensions to original reporting. These briefings would simply recount what was happening, factually and succinctly. They could be laid out in a completely new way - perhaps using mapping to locate the events described. Each briefing would have a simple URL that would take you, via the website, to the best longer version of that story that the Indy could find that night - anywhere in the world in any medium.

The main page one story would be your best feature. It might be news but often it would not. It might be an interview, an essay, a piece of reportage. Of course, it would always aim to be utterly compulsive reading and it would have to be, on some deeper level, of the moment. It should always be surprising.

The heart of the paper would then become a fully fledged magazine. This would take a long time to think through. It would have to be a mixture of general, business, sport and consumer topics tailored expertly for the progressive, aesthetically-driven mindset of the core Independent reader. Magazine design standards should apply i.e. 30% better and more careful than your average newspaper page. Photography could return to the heart and centre of the Indy’s being. In fact, at the weekend (for which we have another plan to be blogged about later) we’d relaunch a Picture Post style photo magazine. And the general editing levels would have to be the best in the business.

The whole package - news summary plus features - could be considerably shorter than any current daily paper and also than the current incarnation, thereby saving paper and possibly, depending on the new presses, allowing it to be stitched.

As for the website, apart from becoming the central exchange for directing readers to news sources, make it a TV station. All those new feature writers, not to mention educated readers, will have so much to say, so many background stories to tell and will so quickly learn to take a camera with them everywhere that you can see the Indy becoming a upmarket mini-You Tube in just a couple of years.

Executed well –and few would do it better than Roger — this would go a long way to achieving the following:

1. Reinvigorate a paper that, being fourth out of four in its sector, needs to keep its adrenaline high
2. Make it yet more distinctive and different from its peers
3. Anticipate the drift of all papers (predicted by Harry Evans 40 years ago) as news loses its value
4. Use print and colour to full advantage with more emphasis on pictures and design
5. Save paper
6. Make the Indy a great place to work
7. Give the website a proper role and purpose

Add comment April 14th, 2008

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

The Monitor Launches

I went to Kampala last Wednesday to see through the Monitor launch…looking at it again today after a long (and much delayed, as usual) flight I still think it looks remarkably good. Much more on this later but suffice to say its success is a credit to a hard working and dedicated staff. Congratulations to all….below see selected pages from the first three editions (click on the pages to see full-sized versions)….

1 comment April 7th, 2008