Fairfax unveils first look at compact Age and SMH

If only there was a way to measure advertising in print as a percentage of the total space available and charge as such!

Oh look! They’re trying the turn-the-broadsheet-into-a-boring-tabloid strategy.

Considering their most upmarket product – AFR is this size, it is quite bizarre they didn’t do this a long time ago. Considering the compact was introduced more than 5 years ago in the UK, it beggars belief they continued with the unwieldy size until now. But then, nothing surprises me about the titanic that is Fairfax. Bring on the Guardian Australia website, to be honest…

The sport section is already at the back of the newspaper.

When has it ever been anywhere else?

Paywall wont work, people will go to free news sources

Actually Al, it has been on the back out of the business section for a while now (which is a liftout, not the back of the paper).

I’m guessing that the paywall will be measured in dollars (metered), rather than length (metred…)

Can you please call it what is – a tabloid-sized edition. The word “compact” is a nonsense.

The integrity of tone is the critical thing for these brands – and they need to think more and more like real brands as they evolve from aggregators of generic content to value-adders to it. I can’t see improving the functionality of the product does anything other than improve user appeal.

I’m torn. Part of me doesn’t like it, and part of me doesn’t care about any of this at all.

If it looks like a tabloid, has tabloid content, reads like a tabloid, is intended to appeal to tabloid readers, is the size of a tabloid, it is a tabloid.

The SMH produces 29 or 30 sections a week. At present, six of those sections are still in broadsheet form, defying the global trend. Soon, there will be just one broadsheet section a week. It’s not that big a deal.

Sports, we can split hairs on definitions, but I don’t see Business as a liftout. It’s section 2 of the daily paper _ with Sport at the back.

The real issue for the SMH is ludicrously early deadlines. Soon there will be just one edition a day, deadline either 7pm or 8pm depending on your source. Editor will have discretion to stop presses for breaking news, but a proper 2nd edition or Metro edition? Forget it. And if you’re a sport fan in this era of night games, you can really forget it.

How long for print? A year? I’m happy to read the Herald on the iPad, but that shift to digital will represent a real break with the past.

So they managed to squeeze the old SMH masthead onto a tabloid page after all. Doesn’t look like they had too much trouble, either.

I like the way it looks.

Very similar to The Times UK….but with much worse editorial!!

Ann – I agree as soon as the paywall goes up I seek alternative sources and I think that if a paywall is cheap enough it will possibly work. 99cents a month works for me !

@jeff +1
Best comment. Ever.

looks good

the paper was massively oversized anyway

how many of the worlds leading titles were that big?

just catching up really

Pay wall will kill fairfax’s killer asset – it’s online mastheads. Give a ******* about this silly paper

Hope it goes well, am truly mystified by negative comments here. Reading hard copy of SMH,landing on unexpected stories I wouldn’t’ve clicked on, still makes me feel more alive. Small screens are beginning to take their toll on my eyesight and I don’t seem to be the only one.

Goodbye Fairfax.

The trouble with Fairfax? Too many overpaid senior execs, too many kids straight out of uni — and not enough middle-level journeymen to curb the worst instincts of both. Look at that front page. What a travesty!

Why? Well….

1/ The huge masthead locks up the top of the page, meaning it can’t used for skyboxes serving as ad spaces or promo boxes for inside content.

2/ because the current boxes are under the masthead, editors will never be able to lay a deep-edge pic over the masthead, as tabs have been doing for sixty years

3/ The masthead should have been a boxed “floater”, with “Sydney Morning” as a superscript and “Herald” in the major gothic font. Editors could move the box around according to whim and need.

4/ The mock-up has two front-page stories, but only one theme. It should have one lede story, one art element and one other, unrelated story down the gutter. No reason at all for Hartcher’s “analysis” to be on the front. It’s a sidebar and should play against the jump on an inside page.

This front page brings to mind some Edwardian missionary sitting down to dinner with the natives and being offering a steaming plate of giraffe testicles or somesuch unfamiliar fare. The poor fellow will eat it and make a pretense of being enthusiastic, but he’s not comfortable, and never will be, with this new strange world into which it has been his misfortune to be consigned.

That’s why Fairfax lobotomised brains trust will try to make up for that by filling the inside pages with lots and lots of more of the same — kiddies writing about how climate change will kill us all, did-you-know-Tony-Abbott’s-a-Catholic? and a posse of parliamentary sketch writers all saying the same thing and using lots of first-person pronouns in the process. In other words, the same content the market has rejected, and rejected, and rejected.

If Fairfax’s consolidated IQ exceeded Greg Hywood’s waist measurement — and he’s a skinny guy, remember, if you don’t run the tape measure around the pocket with the wallet in it — they would have revamped the papers as a direct challenges to the Tele and Herald Sun, especially the latter, which has gone down like a crack whore since Murdoch palace politics saw Bruce Guthrie fired.

In Melbourne there is an open niche for a decent, bright-but-not-stupid tabloid, one which could snatch 100,000 sales away from the Hun. This product won’t do it, but no surprise there.

After all, when has Fairfax ever been presented with an opportunity and exploited it?

Prediction: The Age will be dead by Christmas. The Silly Moaning Herald may linger a little longer.

There is a higely funny story in the newspaper works this week. Linell explaining how they tested the design by strapping some sort of monitoring on the heads of readers. Really.
They pay these people to come up with this shit.
Will hywood get fired? Or corbett? Probably both, but they will fight like crazy to go last.

@Harry. I recognise a bitter old (probably unemployed) subbie dinosaur when I see one. Probably one of the deadbeats The Age booted last time around…

Grow up: You couldn’t be more wrong. Happily and lucratively self-employed for quite a few years now, not a cent of my income drawn from ink and paper. Never worked for the Age, but know quite a few people who do, or rather, did.

It’s telling that you regard people who know their craft as “dinosaurs”.

@Harry. Sorry to have assumed that your snarky comments implied you were unemployed. My mistake. And yes, now that you mention it, in media, I have generally found that people who describe their job as a “craft” are, in fact, dinosaurs.

@Grow up: you clearly are a nitwit. @Harry: you clearly need to get a life.
What’s revealing is the timing. It comes a day after dismal results and a presentation by the management that shows zero strategy. Nothing.
And, like all half baked newspaper editors, when in trouble: RE-DESIGN!

Some interesting comments on the SMH design Harry Helvetica. But you have missed an important fact. The product being sold is The Sydney Moring Herald, not a skybox, a promo box or a major story. They are all just part of what is being sold within the SMH. So putting the masthead in a floating box would diminish the value of the product, as would change the relationship of the words which are part of the name. Sure it might be fun to do different graphic designs everyday, but graphic design – when used properly – should be used to enhance what is being sold, not give a designer a job.

Are we all back-peddling into primordial ooze?

Grow up: I’ve generally found people who refer to journalism — the simple business of turning up, taking notes, and re-phrasing them — as a “a profession” to be precisely the sorts who think magic glasses and re-packing crap in a tabloid, er, “compact” format are all that is needed to gull the punters into re-animating a terminally ill franchise.

When you have finished admiring your earlier comments, a word of advice: don’t eat the biscuits.

I am not liking the new look website. It is too busy. I haven’t clicked past the homepage since it’s launch!

I can’t figure out if it is because it is too busy, cluttered and therefore confusing?

Or is it because half of the stories wouldn’t look out of place in The Daily Telegraph?

Who is at the helm of the digital editions at Fairfax? Do they have a decent news publishing background? My gut says they do not.