When you’ve got a lot of pages you’ve got to give people a different
When you’ve got a lot of pages you’ve got to give people a different rhythm. Is this a pitch for The Mail on Sunday’s mid-market ground?”The Mail on Sunday’s a very good paper and sells a huge number of copies and if any of their readers want to buy us then I’d be happy,” says Alton “I think we’ve got a lot of entertaining stuff. The story count is clearly something you have to watch and be aware of, although I don’t think it is down that much as [the new version] has many more pages.”The structure is broadly news pages broken up in the way the (London) Evening Standard is by columnists like Nick Cohen. The Berliner-version has a single story on both those pages, with the reader quickly reaching features and columnists on the inside pages.
Until that moment, the splash had been Andrew Rawnsley’s interview with the prime minister at Chequers, focusing on Labour’s rising stars Kennedy quitting banished the PM to page two. “It was announced at 2pm that Kennedy was going to make a statement at 3pm and you knew that was going to be the resignation so we redid the front and other pages.”The revamped paper has a lower page-by-page story count than the broadsheet Observer, which traditionally featured at least three stories on the front page and two stories on page three. “The thrill of seeing these giant, new immaculate presses roll is fantastically fucking thrilling.”
Charles Kennedy’s handily-timed resignation caused a flutter of excitement in the newsroom late in the day. The final hours to the relaunch were tense, Alton admits, with jitters about whether its sister-paper The Guardian’s new £60m presses would be able to cope with The Observer’s far-heavier print load.
“There were anxieties that if a lot of pages bunched, the deadlines wouldn’t be met and then you wouldn’t get the papers out – that was the worry when you are printing on that scale,” he says. But the fears proved unfounded with all the deadlines met and greeted with sighs of relief and rounds of applause on the editorial floor. Early in the evening, Alton went to the printworks in Bow, east London, to watch the presses in motion “It was very, very moving,” he says. He’s been plugging his new full-colour bulked-up Berliner-style paper on Andrew Marr’s BBC1 show – jockeying for airtime with Tony Blair, Ann Robinson, and The Sun’s political editor George Pascoe-Watson – and he just has to sweat it out to see if the switch in format is accompanied by a boost at the news stand.
Late on Sunday morning, the relaunched Observer is in the shops and its editor, Roger Alton, is a touch hoarse. Another said: “It’s a wonderful programme, which celebrates the diversity of human life of so-called ‘normal’ people, and not a celebrity in sight”. One contributor condemned the decision to axe the show as “insane, idiotic and blinkered”.Concerns have been raised about the likely nature of the replacement programme which the BBC has said will have a similar theme, while several contributors worried that the “smug” Fi Glover, presenter of Radio 4’s Broadcasting House, might be given the job.The BBC says the new programme style has not yet been finalised.. “This show made me feel proud of our slightly eccentric, very diverse nation,” said one contributor.