The downward spiral begins when you shrink.. like the Sunday Independent (updated)
Nine Inch Nails had a track with the wonderful title “The Downward Spiral”. Were they channelling, ahead of time, Tristan Davies and his wonderful shrinking Sindie?
the new look paper would be “compact, concise, comprehensive”, with the “news values of a daily paper and the production values of a weekly news magazine”.
He added that New Review would replace what were “two quite flimsy magazines”. Books and culture stories will move to the New Review.
“The difference between the paper that we will produce on Sunday and the paper that we produced last Sunday are as big as when [The Independent] went compact,” Mr Davies said.
Roy Greenslade (whom when I was at the Indie we all used to hate because he had nothing good to say about the Indie; now I understand why) comments:
Somebody once asked what the Independent titles were independent of? The answer, of course, is readers. I predict that the revamped Sindy will underline that truth.
Talking to a friend the other day, we agreed that what the Indie needs is to milk its specialist writers and get them to write a personal column every day commenting on the news, or what they felt was news. Basically, get that niche of readers who really like those writers to keep reading. Because that’s where the Indie remains strong. It’s its general news coverage that’s weak. The analysis has always been good. But the waterfront’s too wide now. And the tide’s coming in.
Update: well, the readers who could be bothered to comment on the IoS blog (it has a blog? No, me neither) don’t seem enamoured of it. At all. Nor is Greenslade, of course.
- These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
- Ye gods: raised voices at the Telegraph? (23 October 2007; score: 40.84%)
- I'm not vain, just investigating my output: journalists (and PRs), tune into Journa-list (12 October 2007; score: 31.13%)
- G4 perform 'Creep' on the X-Factor: is there a tree high enough to hang them from? (12 December 2004; score: 29.38%)
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June 1st, 2007 at 8:10 am
Hah! did you see the whole page given over to Juliet Stephenson’s witterings about wifi? I don’t know how our former colleagues stand it.
June 1st, 2007 at 11:55 am
Technology Guardian is a lot smaller than it used to be. Is that, too, in a shrinking, downward spiral?
PJ
June 1st, 2007 at 3:51 pm
When Hamish goes, I go.
June 1st, 2007 at 4:26 pm
Andrew - Ben Goldacre mentioned the Julia Stephenson piece on his blog: www.badscience.net/?p=422. Worth reading for the comments.
June 2nd, 2007 at 10:30 am
Technology Guardian is a lot smaller than it used to be. Is that, too, in a shrinking, downward spiral?
Ooh, sharp as a tack as ever, PJ.
Well, TG has perhaps a comparable acreage as Online used to have, but weirdly the bigger pages don’t lend themselves to as many stories as tabloid. It’s a layout/white space thing.
The difference though is that we also have the Technology blog and the Gamesblog which do a lot of business and include stories. Plus the online Technology page has a lot of content from all across the paper and online.
In short, the difference is that while the paper part of what we do might be getting smaller (which is true for all technology publications, because their ads have migrated online), the online part is expanding. Can the same be said for the Sindie?
I dunno, we need someone like Les Hack to tell us where it’s all gone wrong. But he seems to be dead, or at least in limbo.
June 2nd, 2007 at 2:48 pm
If their specialist writers are anything like “environment” correspondents who’ve been contributing to their woeful WiFi scare stories, it’d probably be better to keep them where they are. Check out Ben Goldacre’s skewering of one column last week (http://www.badscience.net/?p=425), which included some real doozies.
June 2nd, 2007 at 9:54 pm
I dunno, we need someone like Les Hack to tell us where it’s all gone wrong.
I suppose I’m not sure whether it has gone wrong. I think I was questioning whether settling for something smaller necessarily meant accept dwindling sales. Obviously Rupe knows how to sell newspapers and he proved that more was more. But times change. Can less be more? Or at least stable and sustainable?
PJ
June 5th, 2007 at 7:29 pm
It (Sunday’s Independent) was RUBBISH. The content felt tabloid at best, with a perception that the lifestyle fluff got prominence whilst ‘news’ was relegated to small panels around the lifestyle pieces.
And the whole rationale of bundling everything into two differently sized sections rather than the previous 5 or 6? You just try sharing it!
We have had the Indy delivered on a Sunday for years. Last weekend’s effort almost got them cancelled straight away.
The Sindy has a few weeks to redeem itself… but only a few.