After one week reading the UK quality national newspapers, here there are some irreverent and non politically correct comments:
1. Boring and predictable. Almost all of them have the same stories, the same supplements (dozens of 2007 guides and calendars… and 2006 reviews, best photos of the year…), and the same old tricks.
2. Lots of columnists, poor columnists, and verbose columnists. Cheap opinions. Only a few will pass any readers survey.
3. “Page columnists” becoming more and more irrelevant with so much opinion and so little reporting. Ego journalism that will attract less readership than the most obscure and outdated blogger.
4. Good sport sections but with more editing and full color needed.
5. Saturday and Sunday glossy magazines with no future. Many “single topic” magazines that herald the lack of direction. Our president, Carlos Soria, always says the same: give me a magazine that starts to publish “one single topic issues” and you can predict the end of that publication.
6. Small text type faces. As I said, very basic but very big, big mistake. A fast way to lose readers.
7. Lack or real news and stories. These large newsrooms are today just packaging and repackaging old stuff.
8. Excellent links to the on line version features all along the printed edition of The Daily Telegraph.
9. A lot of sofa ads. Amazing! I never realized that the British market was so desperate about this kind of furniture. You cancel all these ads… and the British newspapers will go out of business.
10. And listings, listings and more listings. Sorry, but you have to kill them. Why? Because internet and cable systems offer the same information with the same or better detail and accuracy.
In contrast, a fabulous, fantastic, legendary and brilliant (all of them very British adjectives to promote these papers) 170 pages of the Christmas double issue of The Economist.
Worth to read many, many times.
Great cover story (Happiness and how to measure it) and original pieces and angles that you will not find in any other “newspaper.”
Well done.
In summary: save money, expend just $8USD (&4.50), buy The Economist and forget about the printed editions of the British papers.
You will get more provocative and intelligent reading there… than in a quality press obsessed with New Year diets, dogs that kill babies and why poor Tony Blair can not escape to Miami for holidays.
Oh, my gosh, how much rubbish!
