Updated Monday, Dec. 1, 12:35 EST
TAKEAWAY: Beginning today, The Nation of Thailand returns to its general newspaper format, switching from the business/politics publication it had become almost two years ago. Readers get their wish!
Reverting to original formula
The Nation changes back to general interest content: two sample front pages of new formula
Sunday section front treatments for the new The Nation
xp is the feature section that assumes the role of the now closed Daily Xpress
Leroy Sylk, design director for The Nation, sends me pdfs and a report about the changes about to take place there starting today.
As some of you may recall, The Nation switched from a general interest newspaper to one devoted mostly to business and politics two years ago.
At the time, a free tabloid, Daily Xpress, was created to cover the local news, entertainment and sports. In addition to its free distribution, the Xpress was also inserted for subscribers inside The Nation.
The readers of The Nation never really took a liking to the new formula, and repeatedly made their wishes known: they wanted their newspaper to return to the original general interest newspaper concept.
Now it is happening, and you can see what the new front pages will look like.
In Leroy’s words:
Design changes are minor, but there’s a major change and approach in our content. Our page ones have moved away from the conventional instant news reporting to one which will report only “second-day news” (we’ll leave the instant/breaking news to our website, twitter and iPhone updates). This page 1 “second-day” news includes concentration on analysis and exclusive interviews. In keeping with this, The Nation is adding one more opinion page, while our world and even sport pages will also carry analyses, interviews, comments, comparisons, etc as we lean away from covering solely breaking news. Our page ones will carry BOLD, dynamic tabloid-style headlines, telling readers our top story is a BIG deal. Yes, for us it’s no more business as usual—old traditions will go out the window.
Some changes readers will see in terms of design:
* The new A1 (front page) will have various options for teasers, depending on ads on the page. Leroy has designed either one large skybox teaser above the masthead (it could be sport or features or even promote an important news story,a full report of which is inside the paper) or two skybox teasers; there’s also a vertical single-column strip of teasers on the extreme left of the page.
* The Sunday A1s will continue in the same vein content-wise. Design-wise, A1 Sunday will have 2 options: 2 simple skyboxes above a centralized masthead when they have two “ear” ads flanking the masthead; when there are no ads or for special treatment, they will go for an inverted L-shaped sky teaser next to the masthead along with another skybox.
How about Daily Xpress?
*The new daily features section (section B) replaces the free Daily Xpress compact (publication of which has been suspended for now as a cost-saving measure). The new features section is called “xp”, which, adds Leroy, means “EXPERIENCE—- all that life has to offer” and features pages such as “xposure”, “xplore”, etc.
The original change was in January 2008
We at Garcia Media were involved with the development of The Nation as a business/politics newspaper, as well as creating the design for the new product, Daily Xpress.
For information about the original case study of The Nation and Daily Xpress:
https://garciamedia.com/blog/articles/in_bangkok_the_nation_pioneers_with_free_tabloid_newspaper_as_companion_to
TheMarioBlog post #428