Jury out on Guardian makeover as digital landscape evolves
Comment John Mclellan
Bold, striking and beautiful, with a range of energetic colours, fantastic visual journalism, renewed strength and confidence. Not my assessment of the new tabloid Guardian unveiled yesterday, but that of its editor Katharine Viner, in the usual hyperbolic welcome column which accompanies such relaunches.
The new look is apparently the result of “an exhilarating period of creativity, imag- ination and focus” in which the redesign team felt “a deep sense of duty… to honour the trust” readers place in them.
Yeah, whatevs, as the Guardian’s metropolitan readership might say. But cutting through the editor’s tosh reveals a reasonably successful package; nothing revolutionary to scare the readership horses and feels very much like business as usual.
Which was the point. Despite Viner’s passionate exaggerations, this was not a change to create impact but to face harsh economic realities of a defiant approach to publishing which has cost the Guardian Media Group millions of pounds.
Tabloid relaunches of broadsheet papers used to be seen as an opportunity to reposition and grow (I was involved in two) but the Guardian in 2005 chose the nonstandard Berliner size as a half-way house to give it a distinctive place on the news shelves. Instead it gave it virtually no place at all because it physically didn’t fit display units and, worse, it meant it could only be printed on its own presses and made costcutting by outsourcing impossible.
Perhaps understandably, Viner’s gushing introduction makes no mention of the business imperative behind the switch, although she does acknowledge the print deal with Trinity Mirror also means the Scottish run (7,800 copies in November last year) can be printed in Cardonald rather than driven up from England.
So what’s the new paper like? Much store is placed in the readability of a new font family, but most readers probably won’t notice and the only real acknowledgement of the Guardian’s radical design past is the continued use of what can only be described as “big pictures”, with the signature single-image centre-spread setting the tone.
The website has also had a snappy makeover but this remains the Guardian’s core problem: with a hip and connected readership weaned on free access to its journalism, why would you pay £2 for the print version? And for a paper which has placed great store on its digital operation, it’s odd that the redesign has yet to extend to its mobile apps.
But in a final tip of the hat to its spendthrift ways, the back page display advertising position has gone, which could cost it thousands in lost revenue. It has been taken up by, guess what, sport. Aw, Katharine, you’re just like all the others… ● John Mclellan is director of the Scottish Newspaper Society