Sindy goes tabloid October 16

"Ivan Fallon ... said the move had been deferred while the daily paper focused on the threat from the new-look Guardian. 'We didn't want to launch it before because we were devoting our resources to the daily.'"
(From MediaGuardian.co.uk)

Last Saturday was Guardian's biggest sale ever

And sales look set to be averaging at 60,000 a day higher than they were before the redesign.
(From MediaGuardian.co.uk)

19m bloggers ...

... and, according to a Guardian/ICM poll, one in three 14- to 21-year-olds in the UK have their own blog or website. At what point does the number of publishers outnumber the number of readers?
(From Technology Review)

Circulation of main UK newspapers has dropped by 9m in 10 years

MediaWeek feature summarises what papers have tried to do about it.
(From Media Week)

"Implicature is far more binary online"

Wonderful description from Lloyd - employing a whole new set of terminology - of the eternal problem where content goes online and is accessible in ways that bypass the context provided by the source (print) vehicle. Because it's not possible to access a specific piece of content directly and uniquely in a medium such a newspaper, any reasonably sophisticated newspaper reader cannot avoid aborbing some information about the environment of a piece of content. This contextual information will inform their understanding of that content itself. Attitude, signposting, weighting, diversity of opinion, seriousness, tone, and linguistic convention are not conveyed too richly by your average RSS reader.

Content online can of course provide a huge degree of context, but it is predominantly external context (how the piece relates to the rest of the world) rather than internal (how the piece relates to the rest of the content provider's output). Which brings me back to my favourite subject: footnotes. There is a connection here: to what extent should a piece stand up by itself? To what extent do you risk upsetting its readability by trying to explain its relationship to other content, and/or the meaning of terminology used therein? We can't spend all our time saying "we're only saying this because such-and-such" lest everything end up like the 400-word "trial continues" article I so despise. So, to deliver the context of a terse update/a controversial opinion piece/etc we perhaps need to establish some conventions for accompanying each piece with some contextual/explanatory material: be it bibliography, lexicon, chronological trail, or even "balance". The challenge is how to make this part of the piece but without overwhelming it. Inline links don't cut it on their own.
(From Lloyd@work)

Good followup on the Garcia "fusion" story

(From Editors Weblog)

Jay Rosen on bloggers/Big Media showdown

"They have most of the rest figured out, they believe. But not how to fund the newsroom."
(From PressThink)

New Wall Street Journal Asia to deploy web-style UI techniques

Mario Garcia: "Going compact is very exciting because the readers like it, but the real story here is the fusion of the online and print versions of the newspaper."
The WSJA will deploy lots of devices common on the web (and. from the examples given, not uncommon in print) in a more web-design style. On links to related stories at the end of an article, Garcia had this to say: "I see in the future bibliographies at the end of every reporter's article." This is, I think, the most interesting bit (given my current obsession with footnotes, jumps, and inline referencing).
Now, should such bibliographies continue to evolve (online) after the article has been published?
(From Ifra)

Format change update: Le Figaro

To redeisgn and reduce its width in October.
(From Editor & Publisher)

Vanity Fair piece on Guardian redesign, UK newspapers

Sadly (for an article that lauds the "more accurate and truthful" US media), contains several errors/misjudgements:
"Both The Independent and the London Times have turned to tabloid formats, while the snobbish Guardian is shrinking even smaller". Er, no. We're bigger than a tabloid.
"The paper has been technologically adept, even visionary in an industry that, especially in Britain, temperamentally exists in another age." Hm. I've visited about 10 newspapers in the US and I found them to have a much more "old school" attitude to technology than many of those I know in Britain.
"The 'Berliner' is what people at The Guardian call this new size—not least because the new presses are German-made." There is of course no connection between a century-old standard term for this format and the Guardian's recent choice of press vendor.
But still worth a read.
(From Vanity Fair)

New York Times on Guardian redesign

Actually appears to be more of a compilation of exercpts from articles/interviews in the British media.
(From New York Times)

Passé Note

Have you noticed that wherever you read a blog about the Guardian redesign there's this slightly lame skit about Pass Notes in a comment entry? I wonder who has devoted time to propagating this. They might even be doing it by hand - a scary thought - since the entry number seems to be different here and there. This kind of sendup is a witty idea, although the content - while capturing the tone of that which it lampoons - is forgettable. Makes me miss the column less.

Vin Crosbie on Guardian redesign

"Seeing the first Berliner-format edition of The Guardian of London was a revelation, and – one that yields another clue to the rebuilding of media in the 21st Century." Aw, shucks. Article continues with some excellent, more general stuff about newspaper aesthetics and sizes, and the differing influence of advertising on each side of the Atlantic.
(From Digital Deliverance)

It worked

Thursday's Channel 4 News item on berliner Guardian

Hit the "watch the report" link.
(From Channel4.com)