No need to prettify news

Having been involved with newspaper design, may I add my comments on your “new look”?

I once left a crossword puzzle out of the first edition of a London newspaper. I put it back in the second edition, but management had to hire extra telephonists to deal with the tsunami of angry calls.

My point is that readers are creatures of habit and need to be persuaded that changes are a Good Thing. I’m not sure your revamp hits the mark. I’m willing to forgive the oversized masthead (a typographical selfie: “look at me!”) but your choice of text type is very bad, as others have noted. Although your feature articles continue to be unreadably long-winded, I calculate you’ve reduced the overall text in the paper by 10% or more. That’s a lot of lost information.

I suggest you change your text face to reliably legible Nimrod, get rid of the breakouts in small sans capitals and the extra leading, and put bold type back on the op-ed pages. And, oh yes, put the “Sir” back on your letters to the editor. There’s not enough politeness in this world. It’s a start. Readers as savvy as yours don’t need Business Day to be prettified. However, I believe it’s still the only paper worth subscribing to. Minister Pravin Gordhan. He said the Cabinet was “unanimous” on the Gordhan matter and that, “with a few exceptions, Cabinet continues to act as a collective. That’s why even this statement is a collective recollection of what [the] Cabinet has done”.

It reminded me of a political meeting of an independent candidate in the first general election in 1953 of the now defunct Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, who said: “Us independents must stand together.” Perhaps the start of “collective” responsibility thinking in the African political narrative?