Initial findings on ‘i’ by the Snipe commission on New Newspaper Launches
Darren Atwater | Tuesday 26 October, 2010 12:49
The Snipe morning shift was on Oxford Street at 6am seeking a copy of i, the new offshoot from the Independent, which it claims is the first new daily launch in 25 years. Although CityAM is definitely a daily and launched only five years ago. And let’s not forget Metro, launched just over ten years ago.
Sure, they are free newspapers – but so is the Evening Standard. Cover price should no longer be the dividing line.
Of course, the question must be asked: why isn’t i free? 20p doesn’t come close to the cost of printing it (a back of the envelope calculation by us figures 50p per copy in print costs.) The Snipe Commission on New Newspaper Launches (SCNNL) says it’s all about distribution. i is intended to be a national publication and while it is normal to have people giving out free copies on the streets and at tubes in London, what can they do in Milton Keynes or Aberdeen? A minimal cover price means stocking in newsagents nationwide.
The publisher is also concerned about cannibalising the Independent. Because frankly, i is the Independent, with each story cut off at 600 words. If you like the Indy, you’ll probably love i. If you stopped reading the Indy 15 years ago, you’re probably in the majority.
This umbilical cord to the Indy also means that i does not have its own website. This is probably not an oversight or a mistake. The SCNNL believes the ultimate goal is a reverse take over of the Independent by i. A year or two down the road, will we be surprised if the i is renamed the Independent and the Indy gains a new lease on life, without the shame of appearing to drop its price from £1 to 20p?
But that is enough introduction, let’s walk through i page by page. Click on the photo for a slightly larger photo.
The front page is surprisingly weak in story choice, but we’ll give them good marks for the design. Clean, modern.
But really, i, ‘Is Bert gay?’ That was an old meme even when the last daily paper was launched, whenever it was. And Mel Gibson? Hot like last week’s tea.
We do like the feature front, ‘The Housing Crisis of Coalition Britain’, but the photo is a snoozer. Especially for a launch.
The slogan on price, ‘You won’t need a deposit’ is idiotic. You don’t need a deposit for a £1 newspaper either.
The first of the ‘matrixes,’ which the editor touts as a defining feature of i is known in every other newspaper as ‘news in brief.’
The dominant photo is of Jeremy Clarkson, which, like Mel Gibson on the front page and Elton John on page 3, is showing the cultural age of the editors.
Page 5 has the first actual news page. Again, ‘… first time buyers are priced out’ is not exactly a scoop. But we do like the analysis box embedded in the story. This is replicated throughout i and can be considered one of their innovations®.
Likewise, many articles have a little factoid box attached to them. A necessary evil – they do their job well at attracting eyeballs.
Michael Jackson? Is there no-one on staff who listens to anything other than Radio 2?
Oooh, Denmark £9. Of course, it’s Ryanair so the airport is possibly in Kurdistan.
Good god, another picture of Clarkson. However, the five-clue cryptic crossword is hilarious. Tube-ride crossword is innovation® #2.
The gay Bert and Ernie story is fucking idiotic and is someone’s idea of being, oh, let’s call it for what they want it to be, edgy.
But it’s the story on page 11 that stops the SCONNL short.
The headline is “Nazi foreign ministry ‘backed holocaust.’”
Yes. Way to get a scoop, i.
But then we start reading the story. “A shocking study published this week will cast a shadow over Nazi Germany’s foreign ministry….”
A shadow? Over the Nazis? Nevermind, they’re rolling.
“….which until now has been regarded as the Third Reich’s only “decent” government department and one which shunned the persecution of Jewish people.”
What the fuck? Would this be the foreign ministry headed by Joachim von Ribbentrop who was executed after Nuremberg for war crimes, including… we can’t go on. Apparently, David Irving is a correspondent on i.
The next story, about the hiccup girl who became a murderer, we would have played up more. A few days ago.
The opinion matrix is a weird duck. They’ve combined The Week’s condensations of opinions with news-brief-on-a-map that you’ve seen everywhere. We’re not sold that we care what the Aussies think.
We’re always glad to see Johann Hari, and thrilled that he gets a full page. This article in particular, however, continues to demonstrate British media’s difficulty in covering US politics properly. Hari seems to think a US president can act like a Westmister-style Prime Minister.
Page 14 is just a reprint of stuff from around the net. Please see the Snipe.at blog for more.
Page 15 is entitled ‘Caught & Social.’ We don’t get it either.
i is running a cartoon called As If, which is fine, but they missed a great opportunity to run Em now homeless since the closure of TheLondonPaper.
Whatever.
Whatever.
Whatever.
God, it goes on.
i has run the ‘Walkman is history story.’ Is i selling the prototype edition that they printed to demonstrate proof of concept, because we can’t figure out why this story is here.
Let’s call the telly grid innovation® number three. It lists shows by genre, rather than channel. We don’t think it is useful but we haven’t seen this done before, so kudos for imagination.
Zach Galifianakis, who gets a small photo on this Mel page, would be a much better subject of a story for i’s intended demographic. Just saying.
No one here read this.
Who can argue with a top ten list?
Nothing new to see here – but wasn’t the musical biopic story popular in 2005? This seems like another one from the prototype.
If the arts gallery photo of Lauren Cuthbertson had been a full page, it would have been delightful. Surely, the Carpetright ad could have been moved elsewhere, maybe replacing a Clarkson.
Apparently, Scotland doesn’t deserve a nice weather map.
If you can tell the difference between the i business section and the Evening Standard’s business section, you are better than the SCNNL.
Sport is the largest section. No comment.
Where does this leave us? In the considered opinion of the Snipe Commission on New Newspaper Launches, i is a far superior product than Metro. But i isn’t free, and, is that difference between 20p and £1 all that really stands between people buying a paper or not?
The SCNNL finds as follows:
1. After the initial flurry of interest, we don’t expect sales to be anything significant
2. We expect i to be released as a free paper very soon, and we would not be surprised to discover that that was the plan all along
3. We expect a merger of i and the Independent in the near future
Here are some other views:
i think therefore i am unwanted [The Great Wen]
Aye aye, it’s ‘i’ [853]
i lives up to its name – it’s a digest of its big brother, like an upmarket Metro [Roy Greenslade]
Design review of ‘i’ [This Is Pop]
As I have an advanced degree in comic strips, I can tell you that Em was not long for the Sun and stopped running after a few months. Someone really needs to pick it up.
By Darren Atwater on Tue 26 October 2010 13:31
free? it should be free? so the campaign begins? and the slogan is – i: GIVE it to me baby, ah hah ah hah! GIVE it to me baby, ah hah ah hah!
By vuk zhaba zhaba on Tue 26 October 2010 19:48
I think you’re being slightly unfair about the Nazi foreign office was evil story – it was in today’s New York Times, for example…
By Chris on Wed 27 October 2010 01:55
Chris,
Thank you for that New York Times tip, but I think it proves my point more than it disproves it.
Here is the lead from i:
“A shocking study published this week will cast a shadow over Nazi Germany’s foreign ministry, which until now has been regarded as the Third Reich’s only “decent” government department and one which shunned the persecution of Jewish people.”
and here is the lead (and first paragraph) from the New York Times:
“Germany’s diplomats were much more deeply involved in carrying out Holocaust atrocities than previously known, according to a new report published Monday about the German Foreign Ministry’s Nazi past.
Despite efforts over the past several years by ministry employees to present the foreign office as a place of opposition during the Third Reich, diplomats were actually willing participants in the Nazis’ campaign against the Jews, the report concluded — from spying on Jewish emigrants from Germany abroad to actively contributing to the mass murder of Europe’s Jews until 1945.”
It’s quite a difference in tone. The NYT demolishes the myth, held only within Germany, that the Nazi Foreign Office was bad but resisted. The i story makes the assumption that everyone, everywhere will be shocked to hear that the Nazi Foreign Office carried out Nazi policy.
The story from the Independent, from which the i story was cobbled, is slightly better but still has a strange tone that expects us to be shocked at this revelation.
By Darren Atwater on Wed 27 October 2010 08:57
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