But I do like to buy the physical paper when changes are afoot and so for the past couple of weekends, I've paid the £3.50 for the Saturday edition as it transitions from a clutch of different supplements, some of which have been running for a few decades, to a single entity covering some of the same material and a few others. A lot has changed since the mid-90s heyday when it even had a supplement dedicated to collating material from other publications and could try experiments like leaflets which tried to imagine what a news publication looks like now.
Saturday glances backwards and forwards. Returning to a format close to original 90s magazine, it's essentially much of the editorial innards from the glossy Weekend of recent times with the contents of The Guide and Review sections wedged in the middle before the lifestyle section. If you weren't aware of the change and simply looked at the various themes on The Guardian's website, I'm not sure you'd see much of a difference. You can definitely tell what would have been the cover story on The Guide this month and Armando Iannucci's Brexit poem would have sat easily in Review instead.
In other words, it brings some order to the chaos of the different supplements by making them more cost effective.
Another approach would have been to retain the brands but simply put them under the same paper-based roof but this no doubt offers some tonal flexibility within the editorial if there's another major event and the supplement wants to produce a special issue. Instead we have a pot pourri of interviews and articles which comes across as a degree level version of The One Show, albeit without the interviewees being asked to weigh in on whatever Tim Dowling's doing that week, perhaps in the corner of the page with a photo and speech bubble.
One of the new slots, "Dining Across The Divide" is utter horseshit, as a ridiculously ignorant Brexit voting anti-masker talks to her exact opposite and they list all the things they disagree on. Except like Blind Date, the conversation is presented through witness testimony after the fact rather than extracts of what was actually said at the table, so all we really get to hear is how reasonable they both thought they'd been in an immensely boring way. Unless The Guardian's has some trick up its sleeve, every single one of these columns is going to be identical.
But there's also a really lovely piece in which Sophie Ellis-Bextor and her Mum Janet recreate an old photo from the mid-80s and they each talk about their relationship with one another and how her Mother's fame effected her at school and elsewhere growing up. Sophie says she lot her step-dad just before lockdown and doing the kitchen karaoke was one of her coping mechanisms. Walking the Merseyrail map and hopefully blogging some more might just be mine. Both pieces are stored in a section called "cuttings" which seems like it would have been the ideal place to put Blind Date but that's still at the back in the lifestyle section.
Overall I was very impressed with Saturday. It has a weight and heft and plenty to read and ticks all of my aspirational boxes of making suggestions for things which'll take me out of my comfort zone, enough that I'm seriously considering buying the paper again, at least on a Saturday. I've been feeling a bit out of touch lately and with one TERFy exception, it feels like its being written for someone like me who wants an introduction to new things but isn't always sure how to access them. It's really just a case of deciding whether I can afford it, especially when the contents are on the website anyway.
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