New Journalist: no story left behind

Journalist editor TIM GOPSILL explains the switch in the magazine’s presentation

AS AN EDITOR, people often ask me, “Shouldn’t you take a look at the design?” The Journalist’s design hadn’t changed for a long time: the fonts for 10 years and the layout grid for 15. The editorial board has looked at alternatives and concluded that none of them were better than what we had, so, why change?

Magazines sometimes seem to change their designs just for the sake of it. There has to be a good reason, and we are responding to the best: technological change.

The Journalist is going multimedia so the printed magazine has a new function: no longer to bring news of what’s happening in the NUJ, but to complement news on the website with longer features, opinion, debate and so on.

In other words we are responding to the process of convergence, that has caused so much grief across the newspaper industry, in a positive way. For me, it is a release from the straitjacket of the fixed proportion of news pages, features, letters, overseas news, and so on.

News is a real problem for a monthly. The old flatplan had six news pages, and there was always enough copy to fill 12. The “musts” — disputes, notable union events and so on — took the lion’s share, so other decent stories got cut back and the marginals got binned. But these lost stories on activities in sectors of the union would have been important to the members concerned — and there were complaints when they didn’t get in.

Now the magazine or the website will be able to run as much as we can get. The slogan is: no story left behind.

Of course the whole lot could go online. The internet is great for news, opinion and debate, if not for features. But members made it clear that they wanted to keep the printed magazine when, as an experiment, the April edition this year was produced online only. In the 250-odd email responses there were some who said they would be happy to look at the Journalist online only but the majority said, “keep the printed magazine” — some quite determinedly.

The magazine in its new feature-led form will come only bi-monthly, which will save the union some £90,000 a year. And the members will get a better multimedia service.

It all looks rather good to me. This internet convergence thing — what’s the big deal?