Anybody else really dislike the new look Irish Times?
On page three of yesterdays paper was a piece by Geraldine Kennedy explaining the “new look Irish Times”. Looks like more tabloid sized supplements are on the way, motors on Wednesday will become a 16 page tabloid as will a new travel section. Perhaps IT are thinking of changing the whole paper to tabloid size in the near future, reasonable speculation imo, seeing as IT was always strictly non-tabloid even when it came to their supplement pages.
As for the new look in the main broadsheet paper, well, it’s crap to be honest! The amount of spacing between articles is madness and takes the intelligent feel away from the paper. I also can’t help but get the feeling that the paper is going to be “dumbed down”, when Geraldine Kennedy stated “we will continue to give the serious reader the long read or the important script of 2,000 words whenever the occasion requires it”. I thought all IT readers were serious, why else would they spend 1.80 on a paper, they are hardly going to buy it just for the pictures. Oh I forgot to mention there’s a new supplement dedicated just to pictures!!
Only had a brief glance at a copy of the paper yesterday but I don’t think much of their changes. They said this was the biggest change in the history of the paper and all they’ve done is make a few supplements a bit longer by changing them to tabloids.
The main paper is now an assortment of different styles I think, trying to keep the authority of the front page and the letters pages while changing the other pages around.
If they really wanted to make a change they should have worked far harder on two things:
Improving their comment section - they’ve expanded it but they’ve still got plenty of shite commentators
Getting a proper features section (like G2 with the Guardian). The Saturday magazine is an embarrassment and making it any longer won’t change that.
The pay wall has descended on the website. A lot of you nerds will probably already know this but if you right-click the headline and click “open link in incognito window” on chrome then the article will open no problem. Got shown this fancy trick by a colleague this morning.
The Irish Times have lost a ridiculous court case where they tried for an injunction to prevent The Times (of London) from launching an Irish edition called, The Times, Irish Edition. Fairly pointless exercise by The Irish Times to try and prevent this launch, given the existence of the newspaper already in Ireland. They lost before they even got to make any legal arguments anyway because they’ve known about the intended Irish launch for a number of years but didn’t bother applying for an injunction until now.
Wonder if they used the same legal advisors that they employed to argue their case that they came up with groupon.ie all by themselves and completely independently of groupon.com and had the idea for the same name and the same concept entirely on their own with no awareness at all of the other site.
One disastrous decision after another for them. Still, I’m sure they’re getting their €50m worth from myhome.ie.
It seems they’re determined to run the place into the ground between disastrous investments and giving labour and quango handwringers free reign in the OP. its nearly as bad as the info except it takes itself so seriously
Jackie Tyrrell’s punditry career has started well in the paper of record. His second decent column today. Something of a step up from John Allen and Arrigle
