theguardian …
Le Guardian… d’accord, on évitera le cliché « fait peau neuve ». Il a changé de formule. Assez radicalement, car il passe du format (très large) « broadsheet » au Berlinois, c-à-d le même que Le Monde.
Suivez les liens pour accéder à l’édition numérique (en entier, encore pour deux semaines) et faites-vous une idée, si cela vous branche.
… is all shiny and new and blue as of today. With a lowercasenospaces masthead. On the Editors’ Blog, several commenters call it “thegrauniad” already.
Seriously, I rather like it. The new (”Berliner”) format is the same as Le Monde’s, which I’ve always found the most pleasant newspaper to handle, with only a minimum of wrestling required. I also agree with the decision to leave some white space below the headlines. The typeface is a bit more problematic. Helvetica is gone, but I’m not sure about the new headline typeface (”Guardian Egyptian”): there’s a distinct gap in the uppercase and lowercase letter k, and the distance between individual letters looks a bit haphazard in some cases. It’s certainly very legible, though.
Oh, you want to look at it? The entire digital edition, normally a for-pay subscription, is freely accessible for two weeks or so, with downloadable pdf files.
I discovered the two-page, mostly graphical dossiers in the G2 newspaper-inside-the-newspaper. These could be very interesting for EFL teachers, to use from the intermediate level upwards. Today’s is about the arms trade.
Two addenda:
Guardian Unlimited (the online edition, not to be confused with the digital edition) is certainly doing a lot of auto-reporting today. A little gem from one of their articles:
In many important respects the paper you buy on Monday will be dramatically different. Most obviously, it will be, physically, both narrower and shorter - larger than a tabloid, smaller than a broadsheet. With apologies to JF Kennedy, “Sie ist ein Berliner”.
And I thought only ships, cars and countries were female (feminine?) in British English. (And shouldn’t that be “eine Berlinerin”?)
Second, I just got my hands on the real thing, albeit a copy from an earlier print run, with a Cricket photo on the front page instead of the Belfast riots one. It certainly looks nice inside: a clear, attractive layout. Even the headline typeface is much better on paper than on the screen.
Related posts: Interview with New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin, uncensored, About that other Superdome, The cat and the pigeon
Technorati (tags): Guardian, journaux, media, newspapers
Une lettrine sur huit lignes!? An eight-line drop cap!? It takes up more than half the width of the fifth column, and yet look at its spindly little legs! That’s the one part of this design I find really awkward, although I agree that “Bacl<lash” and “UI<” are a bit distracting.
I think feminine is the default for personified institutions in English generally. (The New York Times is sometimes called “the Gray Lady” (even though it is now printed partly in colour).) But I’m not sure theguardian is being personified here—in the preceding sentence, it’s referred to in English with it. So maybe the sie is intended to reflect the gender of Zeitung? But that seems too subtle given that the author wrote “ein Berliner” instead of “eine Berlinerin”—so maybe sie refers to the personified newspaper qua institution, while it refers to the (non-personified) specific copy of the paper the reader buys on Monday. Or maybe I’m overinterpreting.
I agree with you about those spindly drop caps in the main paper. Very strange. And in the G2, the caps are extra-bold and don’t drop, but rise up, almost phallus-like, from the first line. (They had a last-minute problem with G2 when they realised that on one double page, those caps spelled out “T I T”.) A good idea, though, is to set comment/opinion pieces left-justified (ragged-right), to set them off from (justified) news reporting.
The gap-toothed “k”s sprang to my eye when I saw the pdf, but on the real paper, I had to look for them. I reserve my judgement.
I hadn’t thought about the gender of “Zeitung” — you may be right, and the journalist’s feeling for German may well have run out after the effort of changing JFK’s “ich bin” to “sie ist”.
Now if they just had refrained from publishing an interview with Michael Behe …