Listen. I don’t want to get all sentimental here but The Guardian has always been pretty important to me. My Mum & Dad – working class lefties and trade unionists of the old school (unless they’re reading this, in which case they’re the bastards who ruined my life) – brought me up on the Grauniad (and The Eye) and the family’s dedication to the paper meant that, in the Seventies, when the paper hit a financial crunch and a merger with The Times was narrowly averted, my Mum bought two copies every day. How’s that for loyalty?
Anyway, the ‘Berliner’ redesign is a thing of beauty and the proof is that all the other broadsheet-turned-tabloids now look grey and dowdy and lost. The Guardian, once again, trumps the lot. Well done, you lot! I can still remember the thrill and tension of the 1988 redesign and this one’s better. I’m proud of you all. My friend Vic Keegan’s minute-by-minute launch day blog is really thrilling.
As I’ve said before, the other thing my parents (those bastards!) did for me as a kid was force-feed me the BBC’s most perfect offspring, Radio 4, so this moving celebration of 50 years of From Our Own Correspondent (you’ll have to download this MP3 since the original has been overwritten now), presented by legendary contributor Charles Wheeler, practically had me weeping on the Edgware Road the other day. I remembered all but two or three of the voices featured and many of the actual reports.
Guardian’s Open Door
The launch of the new Guardian is covered here in a blog written by the editorial team. It gives a real sense of what the project was like to work on and is a good example of a modern marketing
I’ve been reading the Guardian for over 25 years (can that be right?). Chose it off my own bat when I left home. I also well remember the 1988 redesign. I’ve grown and matured (?) with the paper and have internalised it to a huge degree (in the same way as Radio 4, god, how middle class are we?). My morning resonates to the rhythmns of the Guardian. You get to know your paper, you take it for granted. I can feel changes, I don’t take that much notice of who is writing what.
I’m slightly disconcerted by the new Guardian. I mean, I love it, but I don’t have the rhythmn of it. And there is some crap. What’s that ‘we gave a SONY digital camera to someone who took a pile of photos which we have laid out in a really lame way and put an advert for the SONY camera at the bottom right’ product placement stuff? Or that ‘cultural analysis’ arts page where they take a perfectly good photo and put caption boxes all over it with little pointers as if we aren’t clever enough without pointers and then you can’t even see the image for the dumb comments thing? Is that dumbing down or what.
But I guess this stuff will last a few months and be gone (like those stripey heads above the masthead after the great redesign of ’88, remember them?). And we’ll get used to it all, lovely thing that it is. And in eighteen years in 2022 when I’ll be 62 (ohmygod) I can moan on about that digital paper thing where the images move to the commentary, is that dumbing down or what?
Enough already. I love it.