Sneak preview of The Times
April 16th, 2007
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.
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.
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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