Straight to the blue box
Facelifts will only hasten the newspaper's demise
BY Bill Reynolds
If you’re looking for a copy of the freshly redesigned Globe and Mail in Italy, forget it. The only English language daily readily available is the International Herald Tribune. I wasn’t especially interested in polluting my recent vacation with depressing news of the world outside my little tourist route of Cinque Terre, Pisa and Venice, but I enjoyed reading the quaint old broadsheet. Its stories are lengthy, involved and thoughtful.
The Tribune is not thick. It’s not larded with commercially driven special sections (Autos, Homes, SUVs, Condos, Trucks, Rentals, Careers, Previously Enjoyed Cars). It doesn’t appeal to the reader’s greed with “aspirational” siren calls to “luxury” consumerism. It doesn’t wallow in the spit of modern gods and heroes—the celebrities, film stars, drug-addled models and rock stars that litter the pages of newspapers. The slim and trim Trib is far too healthy for the Canadian reading diet. We can’t get enough of the poison candy that publishers count on to sell papers.
When I returned from Italy, not only did I return to a redesigned Globe and Mail, fattened with another lifestyle section, but also, suddenly, an overhauled Toronto Star, the largest local newspaper in Canada. Great. Now not just one but two papers I don’t recognize smack my front deck. The newspaper industry’s newfound belief in the Holy Grail of mirroring the internet on newsprint— to spark the interest of young readers, to revive female readership, to shore up profit margins, whatever—is disturbing. The Globe’s racy facelift found few admirers initially, but Rick Salutin qualified the rejection when he told me, “I’m sick of hearing about the redesign. My column is a bit shorter, but not much. They simply follow British design changes and, anyway, we’ll get used to it so who cares?” In other words, it’s beneath Salutin’s dignity to elevate art direction to the level of content.
But that’s exactly the point. Newspapers create marketing buzz by overhauling design, but the design message—Look at those bold rules! Look at how everything is labelled news or comment! Thank you for guiding me, I simply could not tell when Jan Wong was using opinion!—dwarfs content and insults the reader. Newspaper executives are addicted to change, and their papers have changed so quickly, emulating change on the web, they’ve lost their identities.
Newspapers try to seduce readers into believing the look of the web is the look of the future of newspapers. Publishers may actually be trying to entice news consumers into believing they might as well pay for their papers online, because the real thing looks so much like an online newspaper anyway. But the push to migrate to the web may have the unintended consequence of turning readers off newspapers even faster than is already happening.Why should pseudo-internet versions of dailies hit my front porch every morning when I can simply fire up my laptop? Certainly I do not need just one more life-home-décor-sportslifestyle- home-auto section to suck up to advertisers—but not to me.
Unfortunately, the battle between church and state in newspapers was lost long ago—there is advertising on page one, there are more special sections than news, the stories are corporately focused, or based on rumour, or based on polls. Newspaper owners commission polls to determine what their readers want to read, turning their papers into political parties with no political agenda except to get elected (i.e., sold).
When you’ve gone so far down the track of appeasing advertisers, even arts criticism becomes suspect—no paper wants to lose its big, colourful, corporate theatre ads, does it? And as readership declines, the number of polls conducted and the amount of nicey-nice copy increases, doesn’t it? Just squeeze that orange a little harder. Meanwhile, the reader can go suck on a lemon—or find another version of truth on the internet.
But a real newspaper, one with hard news and provocative commentary that doesn’t condescend to readers about the inevitability of the corporate agenda or resort to the right-wing clichés we’ve endured since the backlash against political correctness began, hmm … get it down to around 24-28 pages a day and maybe that’s something worth harvesting trees for. If any quixotic publisher wants to bankroll a Canadian version of the Tribune, even a weekly, as founding editor-in-chief, I’d be pleased to assemble a great editorial staff and a roster of excellent reporters and commentators.
There are enough readers who crave the goods in news, and not just the goods—aren’t there?
