Luckily Roy’s already done his piece (he thought it looks like The Guardian – surprise, surprise) so we can concentrate on the design. Section one looks like the old Independent of the early 1990s, while section two looks like the… Guardian’s.
The newspaper says the most exciting thing about its redesign is that it’s going to be the first newspaper to seek the ‘goal of at last making Britain, in the fullest sense, a key force in contemporary Europe’. What does this mean? In sport it means Seria A will get more coverage that Division 2, in the arts Bilbao or Milan will get more coverage than Manchester, and as ‘decisions taken in Europe affect all of us as much as, if not more than, those taken in Whitehall and Westminster’ the political coverage will become more European too.
Well isn’t that nice? In practice it means ‘we have 200,000 readers, they all live in London, they all earn loads of money and they all don’t like the rest of Britain of much’. A good example of its new target readership is found in its Consumer section which reviews ten watches of which the cheapest is £1,800 (which is nearly 3000 euros if you're an Indy reader).
Essentially therefore this redesign does nothing to solve what I see as the Independent’s major problem. More than even The Guardian, you can’t help but feel that your average Independent reader buys the newspaper purely so others can see him/her reading it. A friend of mine once told me he knew an Independent reader who actually used in conversation, without irony, the phrase ‘I’m independent. Are you?’.
posted by Matthew @ 4/09/2002 08:45:00 AM
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