A trio of sister dailies have been relaunched this week with a “fresh, contemporary design” and additional content.
The Sunderland Echo, Shields Gazette and Hartlepool Mail all unveiled their new looks on Monday, featuring a new sports pull-out called The Match.
It features columns from former Sunderland AFC players as well as other pundits, plus news from other local football clubs.
Yesterday also saw the launch of lifestyle supplement Your Life across all three titles, which includes local celebrity features, health, fashion and fitness news.
Monday’s edition of the relaunched Echo
Saturday’s editions will also see the relaunch of a “bigger and better” Weekend entertainment news supplement.
There has been no cover price rise as part of the relaunch of the three titles which are all owned by Johnston Press.
Joy Yates, editorial director at the newspapers, said: “”Reacting to feedback from readers, we have relaunched our titles with a fresh, contemporary design which includes more news, sport and lifestyle features.
“As well as additional news and community content, our sport coverage brings all the latest from the Sunderland, Newcastle, Middlesbrough and Hartlepool football camps as well as columns from top sports pundits Sky’s David Jones and ex-SAFC stars David Preece and Gary Rowell.
“A bigger and better Weekend supplement with more entertainment news rounds off the week.”
Monday’s edition of The Match supplement
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New columnist ex-SAFC star David Preece never made a single appearance for the Black Cats team. JP management continue to spew forth absolute bunkum.
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These papers are rapidly becoming local editions of the same paper, Mostly produced in Sunderland (entirely in the Gazette’s case) and subbed who-knows-where-this-week.
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To be fair, David Preece was born in Sunderland. Therefore it is a column from a professional footballer who should know his corn.
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The Match is launched at the end of the football season. Good timing, Ms Yates.
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Adrian. There are no sub editors to sub these woeful publications.
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This is not a ‘new look’, merely the same look as other JP titles. So, no originality, individuality, reflection on the local area etc. Features will come from a hub, ads from India and journalism (in part) from those too young to opt for VR or old enough to hang on for the push, plus those now working freelance having taken VR. Never mind: the loss in sales will be made up for by digital.
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In reply to Adrian (another one) the point I was making was that Mr Preece was referred to by Ms Yates as an ‘ex-SAFC star’ with him never having played for the Black Cats. Would you refer to a long-serving turnstile operator at the former Sunderland football ground Roker Park as a SAFC legend?
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The ‘new’ design is awful and it’s just magazinbe type features with some local news spliced in.
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Amazed that HTFP has reported this with a straight face.
‘Fresh contemporary design’ translates as: templates.
All three papers are now entirely templated from back to front and it looks awful- blocky, messy with headline characters running into each other.
There are so many drawbacks, it’s difficult to know where to start criticising.
And everyone in the industry knows what templates mean….
The whole range of talented page design skills contained in the remaining staff – and there’s still plenty of talent left even now – is now, effectively, redundant.
Ah……! Watch this space.
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Looking at The Match main headline, delete the four characters at the front, then the three plus ‘startler’ at the end… and what’s left sums it up rather nicely.
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The ‘new’ designs at JP are a million times better than the atrocious layouts that went before – layouts cobbled together by editors and sub-editors who fancied themselves as page designers but had not a single ounce of typographic awareness in their bodies. Impact, Antique Olive and Avant Garde fonts belong on village fete posters. Helvetica is done to death, amateurish and workmanlike. And hit the road, Interstate, you’re tired and over-used. Then we see stories doglegged around adverts, and legs of copy amputated from the story by lazy design or sheer lack of design ability. And in the old order at JP this sort of thing was rife.
But, I fear, pearls have been cast before swine. Neither the critics of the ‘new’ layouts, nor some of those who clumsily use them by forcing and over-kerning the text into the boxes, seem to have much of a clue about modern layout or design. Most of them have little understanding or sympathy for the good, clean, well-spaced layouts that sets out principles of clear dissemination of stories in a logical and structured way.
In 25 years of working as a journalist, I have seen this time and again – that faction of old hacks who fail to understand a ‘new thing’ and denigrate it at every turn, regardless of its glaring merits.
And it’s perhaps this arrogant, stick-in-the-mud element that is partly to blame for the industry’s inability to move with the times.
One final point. Does anyone who reads the Hastings Observer give a hoot if their newspaper uses the same fonts as the Harrogate Advertiser? Can anyone explain to me how the use of different typefaces has any bearing whatsoever on ‘regional flavour’?
You can all go back to typesetting your ransom notes now.
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