The Age set for Saturday relaunch
Fairfax Media’s Melbourne-based The Age will early next month revamp its Saturday edition.
The paper will be rebranded as The Saturday Age and have a new masthead.
Publisher Don Churchill, said: “The layouts are cleaner. There are more navigation tools. The paper changes pace, creating fast news pages and deeper feature spreads. Overall, it showcases the very best of our journalism.”
Editor-in-Chief, Paul Ramadge, said: “We decided to call the paper what everyone really calls it – The Saturday Age.”
Sales and marketing director David Hoath, added: “The Saturday Age has been seven months in the planning, and has been the most extensively researched change to the paper in the history of the Saturday product.”
“Early indications from advertising clients who have bought space in the launch edition tell us that The Saturday Age will be a winner for them too. They are as excited as we are about the new product.”
The Saturday edition of The Age is the newspaper’s flagship, with the newspaper, along with The Sydney Morning Herald, the most important title in Fairfax Media’s portfolio.fairfax is currently being led by interim CEO Greg Hywood, himself a former editor and publisher of the title.
What a stroke of genius! Put the day of the week in the masthead and, presto chango, once again you have a viable newspaper.
But why stop there? Why not put the date up there as well and really knock the punters’ socks off? They might not notice that you’re running week-old stories from the Guardian, that you’ve laid off scores of subs and reporters, or that the average roundsperson is a wet-behind-the-ears graduate still swaddled in the moral certainty of campus activism and fashionable preconception.
When this effort to con readers with packaging and typography fails, as it will, someone should remind Don Churchill that good content is also a useful circulation driver. Apropos of the meagre pickings for readers to be found inside The Age, it might also be relevant to remind him of Gough Whitlam’s immortal observation about JIm Forbes: “It’s what he put in his guts that rooted him.”
MEMO TO AGE REPORTERS: Gough was an Australian prime minister who presided over the country a decade or so before you lot were born.
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I want to kiss grumpy old sub. He seems to understand why I no longer read The Age, despite the fact that I work in the media industry
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