SCMP Relaunch - A Second Look: The Tabloids

A couple of weeks since the relaunch and initial look, here are a few more snaps of the inside of the paper.

These are from the City section. I haven't been buying it every day, but for the days I have, I hadn't noticed any more embarrassing placeholders going to print.

I don't know how I feel about those orange speech mark lookalikes that appear before the block quotes either. They're really... er... big?

I thought I might get used to it, but the headline type still baffles me. It's so narrow and the tracking always seems too tight! Left alignment is normal, but with this font, font width and tracking it just seems to be really uneven (see photo below "Attempt To Boost..."). Mario Garcia says that he was inspired by how the city wakes up, and in Hong Kong it's full speed from 6am, but I can't see how this type is conveying this to me...

However, to be honest, I've been mostly interested in the new special-interest/tabloid/liftout format. The Food & Wine one in particular that comes out every Thursday, because of personal interest in more ways than one... This is probably the best thing that's happened to English food publishing in Hong Kong in a while. I love the varied approach - restaurateurs, critics, bloggers, um, Jeannie Cho Lee (mais bien sur!)

Of course, there's also the Life Style section (is it two words or one?!) that non-newsy people like me are always eager to flip through. I peeked at the paper every Friday since the relaunch and finally the first edition was released last Friday.

Can't say I was too excited about seeing Mr. Ford on the cover. Nice interview by Divia Harileila (her new blog is well worth subscribing to, by the way) but the rest was a bit blah. The sports car article threw me off a bit, but I guess that's just coz I'm a girl? I don't know, whenever I see yachts and sports cars I think "mainland" or "vulgar bling Russian". Much as I now have my reservations about Monocle, I think it's an understated luxury mag done right. But then again, who are SCMP's readers? Are they mainland/Russian blingsters? But they don't read in English... Are they students? Expats? In fact it's not just the style liftout, but the whole paper that begs the question.

(This Toys Club ad is pretty sad too - can't they advertise in the Family liftout (which comes out Sunday I think)?)

With Friday's paper came the Style Magazine - a glossy, luxury fashion/design magazine with lots of ads - or maybe the whole layout/look and feel felt like an advertorial/in-house magazine. There was some decent, insightful writing such as this Thomas Heatherwick feature below, but there were some fillers too.

So that's my leung sin (that's 2 cents in Canto, haha). As for the digital versions, I'll leave those for another day. But let's just keep it at this: I like the iPad one. Just wish the tabloids were on it too - the iPad is so perfect for lifestyley magazine content. The website remains sucky and the paywall makes it even suckier. If the NYTimes can figure out a social media-friendly model, we can at least copy it!

South China Morning Post's Relaunch

The SCMP is Hong Kong's only English broadsheet and probably one of the oldest English newspapers in the region, being 108 years old and all.

I used to read it in school (I spent most of my high school years at a British international school in Hong Kong) and to me, it was as good as any other English newspaper in the world. In recent years however, we've been seeing pretty horrific things, like place-holding "X"s on the front page in place of a block quote and so on. Having been in Melbourne and exposed to papers like The Age, I was pretty disappointed when I returned to what seemed like a dying SCMP. (That said - and perhaps I'm being nostalgic here - but it seems The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald now sadly share a lot of content, which is cost-efficient but makes it less "Melbourne").

Then I heard about SCMP's relaunch this year, which I thought was interesting because they were going The Age route (which was probably another paper's route earlier before it landed Downunder...) - there was going to be a special-interest lifestyle "tabloid" insert each day - e.g. Monday is Money, Thursday is Food & Wine (see their campaign mini-site for more). But I got even more interested when I found out that newspaper guru Mario Garcia's Garcia Media consulted for SCMP's relaunch.

Garcia Media might not be the only newspaper/magazine-focused design consultancy, but it is probably the highest profile. They relaunched papers such as The Wall Street Journal, and various major papers all around the world. A quick look on their website will tell you that they now do web and mobile components too. Sometimes these are just aesthetic design jobs, but most of the time they involve more, because for example, you need to work with editors re: flow if you want to change something in the layout.

I'm not sure exactly how "deep" this redo was, but Mario Garcia says on his blog: "From the very beginning, I was aware that this project would not be a mere cosmetic exercise, or another redesign... Instead, the task—and the challenge—would be to rethink the 108-year-old English language of Hong Kong for a new generation, a new Hong Kong and, of course, the new powerful and vibrant China." The last bit is a little vague, but you get the idea - it wasn't just a matter of playing with typefaces.

Speaking of typography, I found the relaunched SCMP a bit messy. I counted perhaps 3-4 different fonts and various versions of that orangey coloured font you see at the top. On Page 2, the only other colour used for fonts (aside from black) was tomato red, then later there was blue etc. I'm not sure I really like that headline font either. It seems to say New York Post more than South China Morning Post...

via The Mario Blog on Garcia Media

On the last page of the news section is a full page of smartphone snaps from the paper's photojournalists, all Instagram-ed and moody. They're soliciting photos from readers too - having a go at the user interaction thing and all, but I have to admit it was bizarre to find it at the back of the news section, rather than say, the City section. Innovation is great... but I'm interested to see how well this works out.

Actually, I'm interested in seeing how the whole paper works out.