Wednesday, October 27, 2010

Why, i?

Yesterday's Independent spin-off i did its best to pitch itself as small-but-smart, despite the clunking strapline ("The paper for today" - perhaps shrunk down from "The paper for Today readers who have been a bit bereft since Murdoch closed that title" to fit the space?) and a confusion between "brief" and "rushed".

There was quite a large clunk, though, in the form of an oh-so-Mirroresque "I love i" box in which one of our great thinkers welcomed the new paper.

I say great thinkers; I mean Noel Gallagher:

It's a top idea to have a paper for clever people who can't be arsed to spend hours reading every day
You're smart, but, oh, reading is such a chore, isn't it?

Did anyone think through whether this was really the message for day one? That i is a paper for those who Noel Gallagher would consider "clever"?

I think I might want my 20p back.


2 comments:

Olive said...

I honestly don't understand the point of 'i'. I don't know about you, but if I'm on the train and don't think I can manage the whole of (for example) the Telegraph, I'll probably just, ooh, buy the Telegraph, read half of it, call Simon Heffer a cunt and write off 50% of my investment and get on with my life. What I won't do is buy a paper just because it costs 20p. I'd also like to aplogise for confusing the erstwhile presneter of 'the late Martin Kelner show' on radio North (East) with the dismal shitpile who edits the Independent. Sorry Martin.

Simon Hayes Budgen said...

I'm not sure why they thought TV listings had to be made a quicker read - it's not like anybody sat down and started with "6.00 Breakfast" and worked their way through the last grim part of Channel Five's listing.

And I'm totally at a loss as to why The Independent decided to drop colour for its photography to create some sort of 'distance' between the two papers.

Post a Comment

As a general rule, posts will only be deleted if they reek of spam.