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READERS OF THE Irish Times are in for a change: the newspaper is launching its new format tomorrow with narrower pages and an overhaul of its layout and design.
Editor Kevin O’Sullivan said the new format will be the biggest single change the newspaper has made since it launched its entertainment supplement The Ticket and Saturday magazine twelve years ago.
The new front page will see the traditional news digest along the left hand side move to the bottom of the page. The newspaper and Saturday magazine will both use a new typeface and the text will be slightly bigger than it currently is. There will also be colour-coded sections and more use of photographs and graphics throughout the paper.
The newspaper will still be broadsheet but pages will be narrower, making it one of just two newspapers in the country which will be that specific shape and size.
The redesigned newspaper comes weeks after the paper launched a major marketing campaign, and is part of a series of ongoing changes at the newspaper. Managing director Liam Kavanagh said in August that the company is planning to introduce some kind of paywall for certain access to online content in the future but did not give a date for when this will happen.
In an email sent to some readers, the Irish Times described tomorrow as “a date with change”.
“The challenge for us was to remain true to our quality journalism while at the same time finding a modern print format for today’s readers,” said Kevin O’Sullivan in a statement. “We hope the newspaper, together with our digital offerings, will continue to play an essential role in informing our readers”.
The new format will see more use of readers’ comments in the Weekend Review section to reflect online debate over the course of the week.
“We have talked to readers about how they read the paper, their preferences and what engages them,” O’Sullivan said.
“The new format will allow readers to gravitate to their areas of interest easily and quickly. We have taken on board extensive research on the case for change in presentation of our journalism today, notably in response to how people consume news through a wide variety of devices and yet retain an affinity for print”.
“The changes are balanced carefully to retain the core elements that make The Irish Times so compelling to readers – our values and our independence”.
(Video: IrishTimes/YouTube)
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I hope it becomes more like the guardians size. I like the Irish times but it can difficult to read in confined places
I suppose it’s moving with the Times.
If it became more like the Guardian, then we would be talking!!! It needs to up its quality and ditch embarrassing journalists like John Waters…
And their reporting on the environment is nothing short of disgraceful – it is breath-taking how they have consistently – it nearly seems wilfully – ignored mention of global warming when it is the hottest story around (even, for example, when talking about hurricanes, which most other papers – even conservative ones – woud not cover without mentioning the scientific evidence for global warming playing a part) – you only have to look at their Environment section on the websit – compare it to the Guardian’s Environment section for example. I mean if I say the word environment to you, would the words A History of Ireland in 100 Objects come to mind? I think not.
They need to get rid of Roisin Ingle, the Jedward of ‘journalism’
… for starters the weekend magazine
is a pretentious piece of Dublin centralism and provincialialism..and it also lacks cohesion and good design..
..the back page Saturday social
page is continually up its writer’s own tight arse….
..the films and music weekly is
beyond parody… and some of the opinion and political writers seem
to exist in a parallel Ireland!
Are you sure you read The Irish Times?
inclined to agree with comments here. the social and personal is ridiculous, roisin ingle’s columns are rubbish (a million blogs of the same kind), noel whelan is the same in the political sphere (my barber has more interesting things to say), the dross is what it says it is. it is beyond me why they include this material. i have gone from buying it every day to only buying it on saturday. even this regime is under threat: a couple of weeks ago they had a review of the new celia ahern novel pointing out that she writes about the same things as dostoyevsky and that comparisons could be drawn. you couldn’t make it up
i dont think that the paper is updating really. it is simply adjusting to what it sees as market trends. fine. except the market they are looking at ceased to exist years ago and the trends all lead to a bin somewhere around the back of the irish independent office
Thank goodness, I’ve always found it awkward to handle.
Cool.
Wish them best of luck. It’s still the only paper worth reading!
It is still too expensive.
as opposed to those red tops rags which masquerade as newspapers…mind you the indos not much better these days.
Damn right Sam…long live the broadsheet tabloids. Articulate conservatism is so much more reassuring than those crude blunt instruments.
It hasn’ t been a decent paper since Conor Brady was replaced. Kennedy was a PD and the current operators are the financial wing of mediacrocy.
It was always the Castle’s propaganda feed to its elites. Pseudo debate amongst the smug gilded circles wrapped in a sham objectivity. The respectable classes(Mrs O’Bouquet)preening and grooming each other.
If Louis Walsh did newspapers instead of boy-bands….
Oh, shittt..is that a drone on me phone or just the NUJ snoring through the disinformation arras??
“The newspaper will still be broadsheet but pages will be narrower”
So presumably it will be the same height and still unwieldy and hard to read on public transport and on small tables. It would be better if they make a small version like the Irish Independent did a few years ago.
Broadsheet newspapers are too awkward.
Great Newspaper
It still won’t stop the rot..
Any specifics??
If they brought out a tabloid sized edition as the Indo did, I’d switch tomorrow. It will still be too awkward to read while driving. .
Too Dublin focussed .Their magazine is OTT and sports too rugby focussed especially their coverage of schools rugby.Too right wing economically and too liberal socially.Too right on.
Cynical move by the Irish Times, make the typeface larger and the pages narrower. Less content for the same price. They must think their readers are stupid. And at €2.30 for a (now narrower) 24 pages it is no longer worth buying on a daily basis, except for the much larger Saturday edition.
The quote at the end is also laughable “The changes are balanced carefully to retain the core elements that make The Irish Times so compelling to readers – our values and our independence”
Which values are these? The ones that remained silent about mass child abuse in the Catholic Church right throughout the 1960′s, 70′s and 80′s, never having the balls to speak out? Or the values that turned the paper into a property porn magazine, encouraging us all to “get on the ladder” whilst their own folly blew €50m on purchasing the Myhome.ie domain?
The IT sold out its values a long time ago and is no longer a credible paper. The role of independent media in a democratic society is to investigate injustices and illegality and hold those individuals and groups responsible to account. In their role of upholding the ideals of independent media and journalism they have utterly failed, even going as far to be a major participant in the ponzi property crash and complicit in the wall of silence the Church likes to project.
What about content???
About time in fairness – as said before above, too hard to handle compared to the small Indo. – late following suit after… What? 8 or 10 years?!?
Duplicates getting boring now Journal.ie!!! :-(
Hope it is a success. Should have gone tabloid in my opinion. Looking forward to reading it.
Good news
Disposable IPads for the morning commute, now there’s the future
Was half expecting Jonathan Ive to appear in the middle of that video declaring his love for the new iTimes mini.
Can no longer pretend that it is other than another tabloid with sex, crime and scandal it’s core recipe.
The worrying thing is that somebody got a shipload of money to “borrow” newspaper design elements that have been around for the past decade. Now the IT will look like the Guardian and The Independent (UK) looked like 10-15 years ago.
The real challenge is to design a paper that will survive the NEXT 10-15 years – and they’ve failed. I loved the Irish Times, but articles was dreadfully overwritten. It would appear that for the past few years the IT subs were told not to cut the waffle and ignore the concept of the modular design.
Seems like The Guardian.Will see.
unsurprisingly,i see another stolen idea from the British ( ‘Guardian/Times’ ) newspaper, it will take another millennium before the pensive RTE broadcasters to get to the level of Sky new presenters.
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