Pondering the new-look Independent on the 21.28 train back from Oxford last night I became increasingly puzzled. It was not at all what I expected.

For our select band of loyal blog readers from Africa, the Gulf and India, I should explain that the Independent’s new editor, Roger Alton, is undoubtedly one of the best in Britain.

In the two schools of British newspaper editors - the writers and the doers - he is one of the tiny handful of pre-eminent doers along with Paul Dacre (Daily Mail), Peter Wright (Mail on Sunday) and John Witherow (Sunday Times).

Any remaining doubt in this country about the relative merits of the two types of editor has now disappeared: the doers are widely recognised as the only sort of editor that can be successful in our modern, supercharged, competitive conditions.

Which is all a precursor to saying that when Roger Alton does something major then we observers of the journalistic world must sit up and pay attention. We are likely to receive a master class.

Roger Alton is a wily fox, however, and his master classes are not straightforward. For a start, he does not like talking about what he does. When forced to, for reasons of decorum or marketing, he rarely says what he means. He has an aversion to theory. He adopts a heavy armour of irony.

Thus almost everything he said in his Independent pre-relaunch interview in Monday’s Guardian really means roughly the opposite of what he said.

In that interview he said that:
• Managing director Simon Kelner has a much more arduous job than he
• He loves taking the tube
• He felt absolutely fine about being shunted off The Observer
• He likes advertising that goes across the top of a double page spread
• He does not see the Guardian as competition
• Alan Rusbridger is one his editorial heroes
• David Cameron, Tony Blair and Nick Clegg are all good blokes doing the right thing (remember Roger was the editor that ran the most powerful of all the campaigns against Tony Blair: Henry Porter’s series on liberty).

This is all quite funny. And it finally dawned on me, as the train arrived at Reading, that Roger’s irony may be the clue to understanding the new Independent. Here was a master class in daily journalism delivered in a thoroughly post-modern or post-ironic way.

About five years ago in The Guardian, Zoe Williams, wrote a very witty piece about post-modern irony. Like the post-modern in art, architecture, literature, film etcetera the new Independent makes sense as an exclusively self-referential commentary - its core implication is that newspaper creativity is used up, so it recycles and quotes its own tradition. As Zoe said of post-modern art, its stance, which is highly self-conscious, precludes sincerity, sentiment, emoting of any kind, and thus has to rule out the existence of ultimate truth or moral certainty. Indivisible from cynicism, post-ironic irony is vacuous, agenda-free and often highly amusing.

Consider Tuesday’s front page. Here is the newspaper craft reduced to its essence: splash, teasers and colour. The splash must naturally be a world exclusive and, if possible, it must threaten that same world to which it is exclusive: thus “The Methane Time Bomb” (an unconvincing story about massive deposits of underwater methane), a perfect example. The teasers must appeal directly to our most powerful urges: sex, money and eternal life. Roger does not bother with money and eternal life but takes three different angles on sex, which makes the irony perhaps a touch clearer. As for colour, we have loads of blue and red, which print well, and then quite a lot of yellow and a dab of green - very little from the paint box is left unused.

Now consider that classic of re-launched papers, the page two “Letter from the Editor”. Roger’s is beautifully pitched. From the first words “You may have noticed a new look…..” to the last “Ultimately, it is your Independent” he does not miss a beat. Every formula of newspaper redesign - “colour-coded sign-posting”, “easier to navigate”, “as bright as it is authoritative” - is lovingly placed in the correct order like some amusing recreation by Tracy Emin of a 1960s Indian restaurant complete with flock wallpaper.

He even describes “improvements to the structure and content” including a pull-out section called Independent Life concentrating on daily themes. When it comes to the footnote about typefaces, another classic of the genre, the requisite words (modern and elegant) are much to the fore especially in relation to the sans font Amplitude which is not very modern (being five years old) and is famous not for being elegant but more for its quirky characterfulness, a sort of Boris Johnson of fonts.

There is then, on page three, a brilliant post-modern commentary on the art of the “page three” (and remember Roger has just declared that pictures of semi-naked women make the world a better place). Guess what? Two rather clunky cut-outs of a pair of extremely unattractive French public intellectuals (Houellebecq and Levy) leap from the page. The story concerns a book due on October 8th in which they supposedly go head-to-head in a clash of the Titans. In fact it emerges that they are not “clashing” so much as jointly savaging some sacred cows of French culture. But it is a good tease: a page three about two middle aged blokes in suits who will be attacking some (unnamed) French public figures: in many ways as brave a parody as Piero Manzoni’s 1961 art work Merda d”Artista.

I have not time here to do the whole paper justice. It must be kept as a collector’s item and there is much more to enjoy - as, for example, on the day after huge explosions in Pakistan and yet more cataclysmic events in the Western financial world, the most expansive World story in the paper is a double page spread on a US soap opera, Mad Men, which may or may not be much good. But perhaps the World really is run by Mad Men?

It is a complex master class, as I say, and my only fear is that without a special Indy edition of Coles Notes, some readers might not get it. Nor will it be easy to sustain every day.

But I think the canny John Walsh has got it. At the end of his Tales of the City weekly column is a description of a recreation of Francis Bacon’s London studio in which copies of the Independent are strewn on the floor. “One of the broadsheet pages on the floor featured lovely monochrome photographs of ballerinas; another displayed an interview with Michael Gorbachev. Can it be that the newspaper you hold in your hand unwittingly helped Bacon develop his vision of a bleak, cruel, nightmarish, monstrous world without hope of salvation? I’d like to think so.”

Other Opinions

Mark Porter at the Guardian

Press Gazette

Roy Greenslade at the Evening Standard

Entry Filed under: Media, Newspapers