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March 27th, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda READERS’ EDITOR
Photo: Michael Clayton-Jones
When a newspaper undergoes a redesign, as The Sun-Herald did this week, there is inevitable lament from readers. And so it came to pass on Sunday, particularly about the placement and format of the TV guide. ”If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” was the recurrent theme.
”The new format, buried at the back of Unwind … is hard to read and not as informative. A backward step,” said one reader. And another: ”The type and spacing is so small it’s … difficult to read. The colouring is dreary and everything is so hideously busy and fussy.” And: ”The new guide is much less user-friendly. It is too large, both in dimensions and in other entertainment content, which is now all stapled together, rather than the previous more conveniently sized TV guide.”
There was much, much more, but you get the gist. (There were some happy TV viewers, though: ”Sanity prevails! The Guide is back on Mondays!” – it is, once again, being inserted in all copies of The Sydney Morning Herald on Mondays.)
Some got lost (”It seems to be all over the place and I am having trouble finding the segments I am used to reading. What was wrong with the way it was?”); others just felt lost (”Investor is now lumped in with the general news!” and ”Bring back Beyond the Black Stump!” and ”Extra is no longer ‘extra’ ”); and a few women lost heart (”A larger-than-life Tony Abbott on the front page will risk already about 40 per cent of your market, including me”).
Many readers were delighted sport is now a liftout, although for every happy customer there is an unhappy one. From chalk (”I really like the new format – especially the sport section”) to cheese (”I preferred the sport section at the back of the paper. It was a lot easier to get the sports news by just going to the back pages rather than having to pull the paper apart”).
The editor of The Sun-Herald, Rick Feneley, says he is listening to all readers’ concerns and some of them will be addressed as early as next issue. But he has been buoyed by the overwhelmingly positive response he has received to the new look.
”We spent months researching the best way to bring useful TV listings to Sun-Herald readers, and during that process we spoke to many readers about what they wanted. We received strong feedback that many readers wanted a comprehensive entertainment liftout that included a seven-day television guide.
”The new guide is a dedicated entertainment section, so whatever you want to do – go to the movies, go to a show, or sit back and watch TV – you have it all there in one place.
”We will be looking at the font type and size. As for the physical size of the section, Essential Kids will not be there every week – it was included this week because the school holidays are coming up, and there were also a couple of special features. That won’t happen every week.”
As for Extra, Feneley says he has never had so much space for it. ”We had 22 pages this week which is much, much more than we used to have, and that didn’t include books and puzzles [which have moved into Unwind].
”And the body of the main book flows, from news to world – with a big increase in foreign coverage – to S and Money and Domain, leading the reader to the ‘extra’ pages of Extra.”
The Sun-Herald last had a redesign in 2010, and it is not even 12 months – April 24 last year – since The Guide became optional in Monday’s Herald and became a regular in The Sun-Herald. Readers will remember the outrage that erupted. (I was still receiving complaints about that just a couple of months ago, on January 17.) And yet on Monday I received this: ”I have bought the Sunday Herald for years because it had the best weekly TV guide, The Guide.”
Lamentations about change, ’twere always the same. When the Herald moved births, deaths and marriages from the back page to inside the paper in May 1977 there was a huge outcry, including a letter from a 78-year-old woman in Killara who declared she had no intention of dying until they were restored to their rightful place. I’m pretty sure she did though.
[email protected]; smh.com.au/readers-ed
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