Paper Monitor
10:55 UK time, Tuesday, 20 April 2010
A service highlighting the riches of the daily press.
Spring has arrived. Time to ditch the winter wardrobe and have a summer makeover?
That certainly seems to be the mantra over at the Independent which has unveiled its new look.
Loyal readers of the Indy, or indeed this column, may note that this isn't the first revamp the paper has undergone.
The latest follows the of the paper by Russian oligarch Alexander Lebedev for the credit crunch price of £1. Despite the new ownership the masthead of the new-look Indy has this strapline: "Free from party-political ties. Free from proprietorial influence".
Doesn't that just trip off the tongue...
The main feature of the relaunch/revamp/total body makeover is the new supplement, the Viewspaper.
"A daily magazine supplement which includes Britain's most wide-ranging opinion, award-winning commentary, more space for your letters, the finest writing on cultural matters, a daily essay and in-depth features on the environment, media, science, technology and history."
If the Viewspaper moniker sounds familiar it might be because it has been used by some media commentators as a less-than-flattering term to describe the Independent's previous habit of setting its own agenda with front pages which weren't always connected to the day's events.
Mindful perhaps of the trend these days for excluded groups to appropriate the insults bestowed upon them, Viewspaper is now very much part of the Indy's own lexicon.
But the Viewspaper does do what it says on the tin - it's full of comment and opinion pieces on a range of topics, though quite how "obituaries" fits into this categorisation is a bit of a mystery.
Flicking through, and at first glance it doesn't look too different from its previous " Life" incarnation. Ah, but look - the typeface is different for starters. Newspaper layout geeks take note, the new fonts are Farnham and Clan. Paper Monitor detects a touch of the medieval in said lettering - it's a very calligraphic, fountain pen-esque - redolent of a hoarding outside a French bistro.
And to introduce us to this new look is (the Indy is currently [cough] between editors) Simon Kelner. Now Paper Monitor followers will know that when it comes to editors addressing their readers through the pages of their papers, Sarah Sands' - ""I want the Sunday Telegraph to be like your iPod" - is the standard by which all others must be judged.
We hope you like how the new Independent looks," writes editor-in-chief Simon Kelner, "but we would most like to be judged by the quality of our content".
Mr Kelner talks of a "the side of seriousness" that he wants the paper to project.
"These are serious times," he writes (are there ever frivolous times?), "we believe that what is most needed on the media landscape is a newspaper that is truly free of proprietorial influence and political affiliation (something no other paper can claim) to make sense of the world around us".
Yes, just in case you weren't sure - the paper tells us again that it is totally Independent (surely the name is a giveaway too).
"You may not always agree with what we say, but it is spoken from the heart, and from a standpoint that's untainted by commercial or political imperatives."
Ahhh, from the heart. PM loves a happy ending. The Indy has gone through a series of growing pains in recent years - is it finally happy with the way it looks?
The 
