Newspapers are not Blogs

The Sunday Times relaunched a new design last week which is part of a movement to merge online and traditional media layout. Its one thing for a media to inform another, its quite another to try and make one fake another because its seen as being fashionable.

The Sunday Times layout looks more like a web page now than a newspaper and its tedious, mostly because web pages are, on the whole, far less interesting than good print layout.

Someone, a long time ago, said that websites were aligned as landscape whereas print is portrait. Somewhere since then everyone either forgot it or its generally too awkward to float content properly in a truly landscape layout and web pages are now generally 3 column and fixed in the centre of the available display, ie portrait. In other words web pages mimicked, fairly badly, print layout.

Now the Sunday Times isn't mimicking column layout, but it is mimicking white space usage and the use of headers, single solid bars of colours to identify the category of page (or the overall section), and its somehow babyish, infantile. No doubt the designers think its clean and elegant and modern.

Well most websites are babyish and infantile.

Perhaps a development which is worse than simple design is the merging of content from blog to newspapers. In what seems like an admission that newspapers are becoming irrelevant to the majority of news consumers they are beginning to include blog columns within the newspaper.

At first it was the other way round. Once newspapers understood that blogs were getting readership it seemed to make sense to make sure that their columnists had their own blog to which their readers could get directed. At least it wouldn't be a rival's blog they'd be reading.

Now though the newspapers are including whether edited or not blog posts from the great, good and influential within the regular paper.

Does this matter? Possibly not, it is just the reuse of words after all and radio lectures have become newspaper columns and vice versa. There is though something even more transient than the "tomorrow's fish and chip wrapper" about blogs. There is frequently nothing more embarrassing than reading last month's or last year's blog post.

If anyone is looking for any kind of grand conclusion on the poverty of thought in newspapers or the ubiquity of blog as 'considered opinion' then they'll be disappointed. I have so few conclusions left to make and none at all about newspapers.

Only a slightly nasty taste in the mouth.