The Sunday Times. Sorry, ‘my’ Sunday Times
Any reactions to the new Sunday Times design? Personally, I’m impressed.
It’s amazingly colourful for a broadsheet, and makes the paper feel more consumable, more easily. As editor John Witherow says, “It’s the first time in its 186-year history that the Sunday Times can use color in all sections and we plan to use it to banish grayness and to reinvigorate the newsprint sections.”
Flicking through the sport this morning, and the palette of colours (it seems very British: very red white and blue) is used consistently and cleverly to help the reader navigate around the page. Witherow continues:
we’ve colour coded the sections: green for Sport, blue for Business and so on – but we have used colour to help you find your way through each section. You will see that the News pages of the main paper carry blue liveries; the Comment section carries green; special reports red. Some news stories carry a yellow tab at the beginning of the standfirsts, highlighting the subject or location of a news story. We hope that the use of colour makes the paper easier to navigate.
I think the difference is that the pages feel less daunting: they’re now colourful duvets to curl up in rather than edifices to surmount, as they used to be. Perfect for Sundays. This is all thanks to the new Murdoch printing press that defuncts the old presses at Wapping. Hard for those 400 printers who’ve had to move on, however, as the new plant only needs 200 people to run, compared to 600 at Wapping.
Nice touch from Witherow: “Perhaps most important of all, the crosswords remain in their usual berths.”
What interests me most, however, is that The Times’ slogan will be updated from:
- “The Sunday Times is the Sunday papers” to
- “The Sunday Times is my Sunday papers.”
What’s are they trying to communicating or effect with the linguistic change? Something to do with NewsCorp’s ownership of Myspace?
‘My’ (or i - lower case) are the pronouns of the decade. ‘The’ is the definite article, and communicates authority, with no room for competition: it’s old school, traditional, hierarchical: the old Sunday Times.
But that’s not the experience of remix culture–where news, media, friends, family, colleagues, music and code are mashed up, spat out, and turned into something unique: your iPod playlist, your... sorry. My iPod playlist (uploading Portishead’s Third as I write), my Netvibes (slogan: “remix the web”), and of course, myspace, my friendfeed. (And they’re running a new ad campaign, under the second personal pronoun slogan: For all you are.)
Now, my Sunday Times: mixed and matched with the hybrid media/culture experience, while creating a warmer, more emotional connection. The nominative ‘my’ is no less powerful than the ‘authoritarian’ ‘the’, and it’s a measure of modernization for the old brand. What do you think? A holistic redefinition of the brand or just a colour job?
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