6June
The Independent on Sunday re-launched last Sunday. It consolidated four sections into two-and-a-half new ones; Travel was merged into the main paper, and the old Arts Books Culture was split between the main paper and the Sunday Review.
The paper seems to be trying to go down the route of The Economist
, giving informative gobbetts of between 50 and 700 words, rather than the excruciatingly long stories popular with other Sunday papers. There are relatively few longer articles. This is moderately satisfactory, though the choice of long pieces was disappointed - a clearly pre-written piece about David Cameron's house didn't deserve the front page, and while there was lots of sniping about the Conservative party's wars on grammar schools, there was nothing in the way of explanation. There was also precious little foreign news; the late-breaking arrest of three people over an alleged plot to blow up a New Amsterdam airport was deservedly relegated to a brief on page six. There was perhaps too much celebrity and not enough real life in the paper.
The high concept of news coverage concentrating more on explanation and analysis than straight reportage is right, though we should remember that it took The Economist
almost 150 years to get the mixture just right. The Sindytab is still learning, and is at the stage of showing promise, rather than actually delivering the goods.
Comment remains the paper's best point, that was by far the best point. Sport was surprisingly flimsy, and the idea of putting an advert on the back page (not sport, not even an interesting picture, but a flippin' commercial) removes a prime editorial space. The middle part of the main paper is the Weeklypedia, full of trivia, miscellany, and fluff, and wittily edited. Rather good.
The design is poor - we found the news pages, in particular, to be too busy - cramming in two small adverts in each page didn't work. Nor did the idea of providing text hyperlinks - a Read more footnote at the end of almost every story is a good idea, but changing to a light grey typeface is a gimmick, and not an attractive one. To the paper's credit, most of the links are relevant, if not particularly inspired, but some of them are painfully shoehorned in - one book review seems to have been revised purely to include a mention of suffragete and provide a link.
The Sunday Review has lost some of its bite, but still remains better than the competition. The television listings are perhaps the worst we've ever seen - all we get are times and titles, and for a rather obscure list of 20 channels. Radio remains a disaster - is it necessary for the entire country to see listings for the BBC's local London station? We would far sooner reduce the listings to a couple of pages giving proper coverage of a few channels for Sunday only, then a pageful of highlights for the rest of the week. (That should also free up six pages for some proper editorial.) Business section remains a bit naff, but none of the Sunday papers have ever had much to shout about in that department. Travel never did much for us, and still doesn't.
Overall, the closest analogy seems to be with the daily Independent during Andrew Marr's editorship. For about six months in late 1997 and early 1998, the paper trod a remarkable and weird path - a strange sans-serif headline font, lots of white space, giving lots of stories brief coverage, and eschewing the divide between domestic and foreign news. It was a newspaper that almost seemed to revel in avoiding the news, and was perhaps the one time that the Indy ceased to be a paper of record. That experiment didn't work, and was dropped within days of Marr leaving the paper in May 1998. A Sunday paper giving lots of short pieces is a novelty, one that should be able to seize a niche in the market. Whether that will alienate more readers than it attracts remains to be seen.
Assuming that the publishing model is viable, the main determinant of success will be the price of the paper; the first issue retailed for £1 - so will next week's - and there is clear room to increase that price. Elsewhere on the news rack, we reckon that the Hell on Sunday, at £1.40, is priced correctly, and that the £2 Sunset Times could reasonably add 10p or 20p but prefers not to. On that analysis, the Observer's £1.80 cover price is roughly correct, while the Sunday Telegraph should sell for no more than £1.60. (That's assuming that the STel's not become a signficantly better paper since we last saw it.) The Sindie is so much smaller than the STel that it has to sell at a discount, and we still think that approximate price parity with the Hell is where the paper will have to end up.
The only way for the Sindie to justify a higher price would be to give away something of small but noticeable intrinsic value each week - would it, for instance, be possible to chop up some classic literature (Dickens springs to mind) into 48-page mini-paperbacks and give one away each week? Buy the paper for fifteen weeks, and collect the entire work...
Another possibility is one-off pamphlets on a subject, such as Exceptionally Dull Newspaper Headlines Printed, Not Many Interested.
