The Financial Times will offer a “simplification” of its print design on Monday, Tom McGeveran reports. The new design “enables us to shift our focus more into digital platforms and strike the right balance in our digital first newsroom,” FT Editor Lionel Barber says in a memo to staff.
McGeveran predicts “a newspaper more suited to the presentation of longer, more analytical and more visually focused articles than the almost intentionally stodgy, old-fashioned format of the paper has previously allowed.” He continues:
On a cellular level it’s an editorial position being taken up much more frequently these days at the desk level of broadsheets, who are finding slaving away to create hard-to-report articles that everyone has read online by the time the newspaper truck arrives at the newsstand increasingly unsatisfying, and are starting to think of print as a home for stories and approaches that are unlikely to be replicated by the competition and discretionary enough to be held for late-night or morning publication.
Case in point: The Guardian will debut a new print section called “Journal” next week. It will include a long reads section edited by former New Yorker editor Jonathan Shainan. It will feature pieces “between 3,000 and 5,000 words in length and will showcase a wide range of in-depth analysis and essays, as well as detailed profile pieces and on-the-ground reportage.”
The paper promises a “generally refreshed look and feel” will arrive in its print newspaper Saturday. That renovation will bring “a seamless, consistent and familiar experience wherever and however people choose to read our content,” creative director Alex Breuer says in a press release.
