» Sneak preview of The Times

Sneak preview of The Times

April 16th, 2007

Times dummy frontpage Here is a sneak preview of how The Times - the daily paper going exclusively to Sunday Times subscribers from June - will look. This is their second dummy and it feels like they had fun making it (particularly the mock adverts, such as the Page 5 “100% Guaranteed Crap Ad” spoof).

It has the look of the Sunday Times, adapted for tabloid. It is a solid 52-pages. Pity they have not been able to go for the new compact size (somewhere between tabloid and broadsheet, like The Weekender).

A few things to note about it It has a solid Careers section which is a direct challenge to The Star’s hold on the daily jobs market. It has a modest 4-page business section, without share prices. This may mean they are paying their respects to their half-sister paper, Business Day (50% owned by the same company). It is low on opinion and big on news. Times dummy Careers page

Columnists who are in the dummy edition are Justice Malala, currently with their sister paper The Sowetan, but who would be much more at home here, and well-known stockbroking media personality David Shapiro. But I have no idea if they have been signed up for the real thing, or if their faces were just used for convenience.

The dummy confirms my belief that this paper, if they get the content just half-right, can provide a formidable challenge to existing dailies. Just think: all Sunday Times subscribers will face the decision of whether they need to pay for another daily when they are getting one for free.

But it will be expensive to produce, testing owner Johncom’s commitment to the idea. Printing and distributing 127 000 copies without the benefit of a cover price, and with little advertising for at least the first few months (which is usually the case) will require deep pockets. And they will have to ensure that the mother paper (or the mother-of-all-papers), their Sunday edition, does not suffer in the process.

Times dummy business page
But one can’t judge too much by a dummy edition. There are many nice new ideas which prove, under the pressure of daily production, to be unsustainable. Neat designs often look very different when done against deadlines. And in dummy editions, with fake ads, they do not have to face the curse of the tabloids: adverts which take up three-quarters of the page and leave only a few holes for copy to fill.

Entry Filed under: Anton Harber, Journalism, Print

5 Comments Add your own

1. Nic | April 16th, 2007 at 10:45 pm

Loving the front page story. That is some great “foresight” on the media’s behalf!!

I also can’t help but hope that the design will take as interesting an approach as the link between online and print that is being spoken of.

I am always so bored by the newspapers out there and think that many other people are. It would be an interesting poll to take on this blog to see what people’s views on design are regarding newspapers they read and daily papers that are out there. Just a thought.
2. Ray H | April 17th, 2007 at 1:22 pm

Anton - Justice Malala and David Shapiro are two of the great columnists we have lined up … (hope they don’t mind that the cat is out the bag!)
Couldn’t agree with you more on the dummy thing. We want to get out into the real market as soon as possible - hence the tight June deadline for launch - precisely because we want to avoid ‘dummy fatigue’.
3. matthew buckland | April 18th, 2007 at 10:38 am

I think The Star is in trouble. I hate to say it, but in very, very big trouble. People spoke of the challenges to the Saturday Star from the Weekender which have not really materialised, but this is entirely different. The Star does not have a major hook like it’s Saturday cousin: Property.
4. Chris | April 22nd, 2007 at 8:50 pm

I think it’s high time we had a decent, newsy tabloid with decent layout to challenge The Star and The Citizen. They’ve been complacent for far too long, and have become hoary, tired and not terribly interesting to read.
I have a feeling that advertisers will happily come to the party if they know that the daily will be distributed free to at least 120 000 homes, equalling at least twice as many readers. It’s a captive, guaranteed audience (of upper LSMs, I’d imagine).
5. Karl | June 11th, 2007 at 7:43 pm

Am I alone in wondering what the people behind ‘The Times’ have been doing for that last two months?

Few launch newspapers have had a longer lead-in time than this new freesheet and what they served up on Tuesday of last week could have been produced six to seven weeks ago. It’s bland and vanilla; completely devoid of any kind of attitude purpose and, it would appear, much advertising.

There are more podcasts than you can shake a dodgy Telkom broadband connection at on the website though.

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Anton Harber: Media

Professor Anton Harber directs the Journalism and Media Studies Programme at Wits University. He is former editor of the Mail & Guardian.
Full bio

Daily newspaper sales, South Africa
(Ave sales Jul-Dec)
1960 - 681 053 (Population 17,3m)
1970 - 723 566 (22m)
1980 - 803 229 (27,5m)
1990 - 1 214 396 (35,2m)
2000 - 1 117 886 (44m)
2006 - 1 600 000 (47,3m)
2011 - 1 310 000 (49m)

(Sources: ABC and nationmaster.com)

“It was pure political theatre. The excited room was filled with government officials, government consultants, quasi-government agencies, politicians and pupils from government schools. As if on cue, the room rang with applause as one education victory after another was claimed. This was, after all, the annual drama in which the minister of basic education appears on stage to announce the Grade 12 National Senior Certificate (NSC) results …” - Educationist Jonathan Jansen, one of the few with the credibility to look critically at this “celebratory orgy of mediocrity”.

“The (Incwala) ceremony is cloaked in secrecy and marks the (Swaziland) king’s return to public life after a period of withdrawal and spiritual contemplation. Among its highlights is a symbolic demonstration by the king of his power and dominance in a process involving his penetration of a black bull … But last year’s selected bull, according to a recent account from a whistle-blowing Incwala initiate, objected strongly, and threw off Africa’s last absolute monarch.” - Some surprises in this (un-bylined) account of Swaziland politics in Southern African Report

“When the Great Zucchini arrived that Saturday morning, Don had no idea who he was. Frankly, he didn’t look like a great anything. He looked like a house painter, Don thought, with some justification. He wears no costume. He was in painter’s pants, a coffee-stained shirt and a two-day growth of beard. He toted his beat-up props in beat-up steamer trunks, with ripped faux leather and broken hinges hanging askew.” - A classic of magazine profiling, by Gene Weingarten of the Washington Post.

Diepsloot (Jonathan Ball, 2011)

Diesploot: Of Frogs and Fractals, a public lecture at the University of Johannesburg, 4 August 2011

Troublemakers - The Best of South Africa’s Investigative Journalism (Jacana, 2101), edited by Anton Harber and Margaret Renn

Introduction - The Troublemakers: An account of the rise of a new wave of investigative journalism in South Africa.

What is Left Unsaid: Reporting the South African HIV Epidemic, edited by Kristin Palitza, Natalie Ridgard, Helen Struthers and Anton Harber (Fanele, 2010)