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Monday, May 18, 2009

NATION'S LATEST SUNDAY OFFERING

The 'new look" The Nation on Sunday made its debut yesterday.
Ace magazine is gone, having lasted barely six months and failing to attract significant advertising. The publishers say that Ace's content has been incorporated into the new 'Leisure' second section, but sadly what worked in an A4 glossy magazine just does not work in The Nation's broadsheet format. It's the fourth time in little over a year the published has played with its Sunday publishing model.

Apart from the 'bond paper' wrapping to both sections what's most noticeable about this latest offering is it's size - just 24 pages in two wafer-thin sections. To me this would appear to be a plan to continue publishing something on a Sunday (and hence retain the tag of being a daily newspaper) at minimum cost.

4 comments:

Matthew Hunt 10:05 AM  

Agreed. Ironically, the new bond paper for the Sunday and weekday issues must surely be expensive, and doesn't seem to me to be worthwhile.

The front-page lead of the new Leisure section was... a book review! Hmmm. It's a good article by Wise Kwai, but how many other arts sections put their book reviews on the front page?

Catherine 12:05 PM  

Forget the credit crisis, it has got to be a bad market for anyone publishing newspapers these days.

Two weeks ago I made my way through 'The journalist's Handbook', which described the transformation of the UKs top newspapers to broadsheet.

Just like The Nation, they had to put their toes in the water first.

Matthew Hunt 10:28 PM  

Sorry, a quick comment after re-reading. I thought 'daily newspapers' published Monday to Saturday. The Nation would still be a daily paper if it had no Sunday edition; in fact, the Sunday edition is The Nation On Sunday, not The Nation.

Also, while 24 pages is certainly alarmingly thin, it's actually a bit thicker than the old pre-Ace editions, which were sometimes as low as 18 pages total.

Mat.

Unknown 10:43 PM  

thin wise aside, the design looks a bit like singapore's straits times lol :)

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