Letter to the Globe and Mail

A large stack of the newly revamped Globe and Mail sat unclaimed on the newsstand when I came in for work at 3 p.m. today. My co-workers and I all agreed that what was once the classiest and smartest paper around now looks significantly less appealing.

It seems to me the Globe has fallen victim to the kind of market-driven thinking described in Malcolm Gladwell’s ‘Blink’: the paper wanted so badly to be noticed, to be liked, to be read by a wider audience – that they re-evaluated everything. They changed the banner, but tried to keep it familiar (adding a maple leaf for good measure). They reduced the page width – presumably to save paper, and to make for more manageable page turning. They cleverly made the new design more space efficient, so that no space is wasted, no words omitted, and no information lost. They even commissioned their own typeface. Still, after all that, something is off.

The new paper just doesn’t look right. It doesn’t even look like a newspaper anymore: the layout suggests it has more in common with a tabloid, or a cheap throwaway – the kind of news-byte publication that is given away for free on every street corner and at every subway or bus stop in Toronto.

It saddens me that in trying to keep up with current trends, the Globe has failed to see the forest for the trees. The new design tries hard to be sleek and easily digestible – but the opposite effect is rendered. The pages are so cluttered that the advertisements stand out more than anything else does. The new font looks cramped and small, and the headline typeface diminishes the importance of the content, instead of enhancing it. Even the ink job looks shoddy compared to the week before.

The old Globe and Mail was always a beautiful, luxurious paper – and one that I was proud to enjoy. Its grand, oversized section headings, with their strong black and maroon lettering – its crisp type, its clear, justified columns, each front page’s generous white space – all this made reading the Globe a rich and thought-provoking experience. It helped make the paper more like what a newspaper ought to be – a conversation. The revamped version feels more like a silent exchange between strangers – a quick, no-nonsense business transaction. I always thought of the Globe as a paper with integrity; I miss that paper already.