i lives up to its name - it’s a digest of its big brother, like an upmarket Metro
The Independent’s i newspaper. Click for larger cover image“It’s a red-letter day! i is all you need”. That front page boast in today’s launch issue of Britain’s first new national daily title in a generation reads oddly when it arrives alongside The Independent itself.If i is all we need, then what are readers to make of the Indy itself? That boast illustrates the problem of a paper published as a condensed version of its parent.
But let’s get beyond that obvious problem of newspaper cannibalism to consider the content in the 56 pages of i.
It begins with an Independent trade-mark poster-style front page with several cross-reference blurbs, and opens into a couple of pages of news-in-briefs.
I couldn’t see the point of the page 2 top-to-bottom picture of Jeremy Clarkson (no caption, no reference in adjacent copy) until I read further into the “news matrix” and discovered a story about him on page 9. Rather bizarre.
We reach the “opinion matrix” on page 12, with one-paragraph “lifts” from commentators and editorials of papers in Britain and abroad. Opposite is devoted to Johann Hari’s Indy column.
After a page reproducing blogs and tweets and a people page (with an awful pun catchline, Caught & Social) comes the final opinion page and we go back into several more pages of short news items from home and away.
The spread is given over to TV listings with a hard-to-read guide in what looks like the equivalent of 6pt type. After that is a run of features pages, leading off with a goodish piece on Mel Gibson.
There are four pages of arts reviews, five pages of business - with the obligatory “business matrix” digest - and eight pages of sport plus a page of puzzles.
Well, that’s the skeleton. But the overall effect of i - the look, the pace and content taken together - strikes me as a sort of upmarketMetro, or even a British-style USA Today.
Indeed, there were also overtones of Today, the British title launched in 1986 by Eddy Shah and closed down in 1995 byRupert Murdoch because of its failure to make a profit.
i is what it says on the tin: a paper for time-poor people dashing between home and work. It is pleasantly designed, bright, colourful without being garish, easy to read, and fast-paced.
In essence, it is pop paper with serious or, at least, semi-serious content. I say that because it is difficult to regard very short items, even when they deal with serious topics (such as Iran’s funding of the Afghan president and Haiti’s cholera outbreak) as serious coverage.
That, of course, is the point of the exercise. It is the belief of the Indy’s senior team - especially managing director Andrew Mullins and editor Simon Kelner - that there is an audience for a paper that offers nuggets of information.
My hunch, on the basis of this first issue, is that the cross-over from full-strength Independent to decaffeinated i will not be too great. The differences between the two papers - Big I and Little i - are greater than the similarities.
But the fact that it resembles Metro is more of a problem. Will people rushing to work take the trouble to stop and pay 20p for it rather than pick up their free Metro?
Then there is the most obvious problem that faces the whole print market: can any paper supplant the enthusiasm among young people to consume their news and opinion online?
I wish it well, of course. It would be wrong to rain on the parade of any publisher and editor willing to launch into this dismal market. (Full disclosure: I write a weekly media column for the Indy’s stablemate, the London Evening Standard).
But I would be surprised if it can locate that mysterious young audience that, for a variety of reasons - mainly cultural and technological - have turned their backs on print.
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