One of the things that most confuses and irritates the printed media is what makes readers buy a paper, not buy a paper, and decide to move from one paper to another. Editors and publishers are obsessed with finding out not only how to retain readers but also how to nab their rivals’ readers.
Millions are wasted on promotions – the recent rash of free DVDs being just one example – and yet they rarely produce any long-term gains. Newspapers are also routinely redesigned and then a huge marketing campaign is launched not only to assure existing readers to stay but encourage others that don’t normally buy the paper to try it.
In recent years in the UK printed newspaper market, this sort of activity has been at a peak. The best example I can give of this is the fact that my parents have switched paper no less than three times in the last three years. They got The Daily Telegraph for years. Then they tried out The Independent but shifted to The Times when it also went tabloid. Now they’re on The Guardian.
This is very unusual as people – especially those over 25 – do tend to have the paper that they have, have always had, and which tends to extend into the Sunday version as well. It often takes a bug nudge to get them to buy something different.
Every day, a different paper
I am completely atypical of the average newspaper reader being a journalist that specialises in the Internet. As such, I don’t really buy papers that often. And when I do, I happily jump between titles based on what day it is and what the main news story is. I tend to buy The Guardian if it’s a Monday – for the Media section. Apart from that, I could buy the Sun, Mirror, Times or Independent on any given day.
I won’t buy The Express or Star because they are rubbish. I won’t buy the Daily Mail because it is hideous. And I won’t buy the Telegraph for no discernible reason whatsoever.
But when it comes to Sunday, I have always been inflexible. I have bought the Sunday Times virtually every week for 15 years. For the past five years or so I have also bought the News of the World. The Times give me all the info I want, and the NOTW offers great entertainment and covers all the stuff I would never normally find out because I couldn’t care less about “celebrities†and the low-grade gossip that surrounds society’s flotsam.
I have very, very occasionally bought something else, usually when one of these two papers has run out at the newsagent. The Observer, or the Sunday Mirror. But then I have always returned to the Sunday Times.
But I have grown increasingly bored of The Sunday Times. I forgot to buy one a few weeks ago and was amazed at how little I was bothered. I throw most of it away anyway. As soon as I buy it, I go to the nearest bin and ditch most of the supplements so I don’t have to carry them around.
Supplement madness
In the bin goes: Money, Business (if the front-page headlines are dull), Funday Times (which the Times is looking at ditching at the mo), all the advertising bunkem, the Style mag (absolutely hideously unreadable), Home (why bother?) and Travel (unless the front page promises something interesting).
This leaves: the main newspaper, the News Review section, Driving, the Magazine and Culture.
But recently, these remaining parts have also become depressingly uninteresting. The Magazine has a long history of ups and downs. It is on a down at the moment. In fact, most weeks it is incomprehensibly dull. Lots of features, badly written, about nobodies.
The Culture section has also had ups and downs over the years. It has mutated more than any other section but at the moment it is currently a nice amalgam of art, film, theatre, books, DVDs, games and TV listings at the back. It is a nice package printed on high-end newspaper. But Culture at the moment is the worst it has ever been and the only reason I go through the ritual of trying to find something worth reading in it is because the TV listings are the best laid out in the industry and I always use it as my week-long TV guide.
Kill Cosmo
Most guilty in Culture is Cosmo Landesman, the film critic, who is absolutely dreadful. There is simply no point in reading his reviews. Such is his ego that he has forgotten that people actually want a film reviewer to review the film instead of go off on half-baked meanderings that have more to do with whatever drunken conversation he had on the previous night than the film he is supposed to be talking about.
I have given up reading film altogether. Although I always check to see if it’s not Cosmo reviewing, in the vague hope that the editor has fired him. This section is especially painful to me because it was film and its head reviewer Tom Shone, that first hooked me onto the Sunday Times years and years ago. His reviews were so brilliantly entertaining they lifted the whole paper.
These days, we are so bombarded by hyped-up Hollywood media blitz bullshit (to the extent that ITN news will give a famine only five minutes but some mindless movie puff piece 10 minutes) that I want one source and one source only to decide whether to go see a film. That was always the Sunday Times. I feel lost without it.
The rest of the Culture section is also going downhill. Even the books section – which has always been wonderful – is less vibrant than it was.
I’m going on, but my main point is this: after many months of being consistently disappointed, I am in the market for a new Sunday newspaper. I’m looking at making the switch – and that switch could last 15 years.
So today I also bought the Observer. The Observer has relaunched in the new Berliner format of the Guardian, so I thought I’d start with it.
Content, content, content
I like it. The design and full-colour throughout really makes everything else look dated. The paper feels good and look good, but what about the content?
I was already beaten down having been through the Times, so I resorted to a pair of scissors to slice anything I was interested in, which I hope to read later. And, to my surprise, quite a few clippings appeared.
The Times still has better in-depth coverage of the week’s big story, but given a choice of the two papers – and the fact there were no Observer supplements that immediately went into the bin – The Observer is clearly a better paper.
But there remains a fundamental hurdle – the TV listings. I really think that Sunday newspapers hugely underestimate the importance of TV listings. People get very used to their design and since it’s something that you have to scour in details every day, it becomes somehow important that you are comfortable with it.
The Sunday Times weekly TV listings have suffered the same overall lapse in quality but they remain the best. It has finally got around to including Channel 5 on the same page as the other four main channels. But, it still falls down in two major areas: the film reviews used to be worth reading in themselves just because of the genius of the one or two-word review at the end of the description. I don’t know who used to write them but they are a genius. Sadly these days, the super-short reviews have lost their zing.
Go digital, you idiots
On top of this, the Times has not embraced digital TV. While the main channels are covered beautifully, the digital channels are almost impossible to read and I hate them. Despite all this though, The Times listings are better overall – because of the paper they are printed on.
By contrast, the Observer’s TV listings have their own very flimsy section and are on bad paper. The design is wasted because it feels so utterly insignificant. There is simply no way the section will survive until Thursday, let alone Saturday.
I like the Observer but I’m not wholly satisfied. I am still in the market for a new Sunday paper habit. And if there is one that does a good film review, contains interesting magazine features and which has a good, hearty TV guide, they will have me.
