Watching brief - Amanda Platell fears for the Independent
Published 29 September 2003
Most Independent readers wouldn't be caught dead reading a tabloid: the snobbery of the British is never more evident than in their choice of newspaper
When I heard about the Independent's latest plan to go tabloid in an attempt to get its sales back above the 200,000 mark, I felt much as I do whenever I hear the latest democracy initiative from the Americans in Iraq. Haven't the buggers suffered enough?
The original idea was to turn the broadsheet into a "qualoid", a size halfway between a broadsheet and a tabloid. This was inspired: the idea was seriously discussed, plotted and costed at least three times during the period I was managing director of the Independent titles in the mid-1990s. In those days it was called a "broadloid", a size that offered something for the common man without being a bit common.
For a variety of reasons, from the lack of printing presses in this country that can accommodate the size cheaply enough, to the problems with providing separate stands in newsagents to hold the unique size, the cost has always been prohibitive.
So those in search of a quick circulation fix have settled on a compromise. They want to have it both ways - a tabloid size with broadsheet quality. But to your average reader, if it looks like a tabloid, it is a tabloid, and the snobbery of the British is never more evident than in their choice of newspaper. Most broadsheet readers would not be caught dead reading a tabloid, even if it carries the Independent masthead. And does the Indy seriously think it has the resources to go head-to-head with the Daily Mail or the Daily Express? Its entire editorial budget wouldn't come to much more than a month's promotional budget for the tabloids.
The Independent wants it both ways in another sense - it proposes, within the M25, to publish the same paper in both broadsheet and tabloid formats. I have no idea how its small production staff will cope with designing and subbing two different papers every night (anybody who thinks that a broadsheet can be simply translated into a tabloid knows nothing about newspapers) and, in any case, it sounds like another recipe for brand confusion. Independent readers are as brand-conscious about their newspaper as they are about their car or their postcode, and I fear its core values are intrinsically wrapped up in its size.
I hope I'm wrong about all this because it would give me great pleasure to see the Indy piling the copies back on. It is a brave little newspaper. Despite having its budgets slashed over the years, it has consistently punched above its weight. But in the tabloid market, especially with the Daily Mail as competition, I fear it will have its head knocked right off.
Every PR has a list of interviewers they do not allow near their clients. I would have imagined that Cosmo Landesman would have been high on the list of Nancy Dell'Olio's publicist Simon Astaire. Not since The Silence of the Lambs have I seen a woman more skilfully filleted than in Landesman's Sunday Times interview with Nancy. She was promoting her new football pressure group for peace - I'm not making this up - and she said she and Sven would be the new John and Yoko.
With such immortal lines as "Yes, I do care about fashion, but today I want to talk about peace", who can doubt her chances of success? Her strategy to help the kids of war-torn countries is to "build a football pitch". So that's where the UN has been going wrong all this time. "I want to use my popularity to promote peace," Nancy says. Oh dear, that's not going to get us very far then, is it?
The Times's Simon Barnes is the only man who can get me to turn to the sports pages, and turn again I did for his account of Ben Johnson's historic race and disqualification at the Seoul Olympic Games. Barnes writes like Johnson runs, so far ahead of the rest that it's spooky.
Week one in Ulrika Jonsson's News of the World column, we discovered that her former boyfriend Sven-Goran Eriksson has small feet (get it?), week two that former boyfriend Stan Collymore has big fists. And that he knocked Ulrika about.
Even when she's writing about issues of which she has great experience, such as shagging other people's partners and domestic violence, Ulrika manages to make them sound about as compelling as a visit to the Ikea fitted kitchen section on a wet afternoon.
Notice anything different about Cherie Blair recently? For more than a week now she has kept her mouth shut, and the mouth is no longer letter-box red. First, in those fabulous pictures in the Daily Telegraph for the Breast Cancer Care charity; then a week later, her lips were still sealed when the Spanish PM, Jose MarIa Aznar, and his wife, Ana, visited Chequers. All that's left is to rid Cherie of that disastrous new Dynasty hairstyle. Big with flicks didn't work for Diana in the 1980s, love, and it doesn't work for you now.
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