The Montreal Gazette’s front page, before (left) and after (right)
The Gazette is The Gazette again.
On Thursday, my employer brought back the familiar Old English-style logo that had graced its cover for decades (until Postmedia’s 2014 design changes that unified layout styles in broadsheets across the country). Friday’s paper was the first with the old logo, combined with a large Aislin cartoon to mark the occasion.
An editor’s note that appears in a wrap around Friday’s edition and was also posted online says the change “is more than symbolic, and serves as a powerful reminder that although the journalism of today is different than in generations past — and even though we tell stories using digital tools that would never have been imaginable in the 18th century — our high standards and promise to seek the truth remain the same.”
Postmedia also issued a press release on the matter. The rebrand (unrebrand?) comes with a new tagline: “There with you then. Here with you now” — which gets added to a long list of Gazette marketing slogans including “The English Language, daily.” “The Gazette IS Montreal” and “Words matter.”
Besides the logo, and a reconfiguration of the skyboxes to fit its new shape, the paper is the same as it was on Thursday. But there’s a bit of a morale boost among its staff.
An historic moment! pic.twitter.com/oPk2ylTZtX
— Aaron Derfel (@Aaron_Derfel) December 1, 2023
The Gazette has reintroduced the newspaper's classic logo on today's front page with a cartoon of me commenting favourably on the move. Also, here, Gazette editor-in-chief, Marilena "Leni" Lucci and I celebrating the event recently at Hurley's Pub with a group of keen Gazetters. pic.twitter.com/2dBhYXz45q
— Terry Mosher (@TerryMosher1) December 1, 2023
Kind of like rearranging deck chairs on thr Titanic. Face it, the Gazettes owners treat it as a parts car – they want to milk as much cash as possible out of it before getting rid of it. And all the government bailouts are going to do is to allow the owners to milk more cash for longer.
Now, please get rid of the NP stuff.
Est-ce qu’Aislin a encore des caricatures de nazis dans son sac? Ça compléterait bien le retour au nom The Gazette…
I still think Legault won’t get the message that we have been here for 250 years and will still attack the Anglophone community.
Perhaps Postmedia has learned that making “generic local paper” isn’t the best way to go. Returning visual branding from the past may help them to stay connected with their always declining (due to age / death) readship.
It’s a nice piece of symbolism, but perhaps a deck chair moment.
It … looks like … a newspaper masthead. Wow.
It certainly looks better. But, the content has to follow.
I haven’t picked up The Gazette for at least 6 months. So this past Saturday, I picked it up. Expensive, and a shadow of what the Saturday edition use to be. I don’t see how this thing can survive long term. I think they have lost the raison d’etre of what a newspaper should be. And, I don’t mean just The Gazette. The people running these types of media are lost in understanding what makes their product compelling enough for people to want to pick up their product. I would say the same thing about the people running main stream TV networks. They are going through the motions of what they believe the product should be, yet the world around them has changed, and they can’t understand why people have moved on to other media. It’s as if they are in a bubble that confirms their beliefs about what their product is, should be, has always been, and history shows that it worked in the past. And, they’ll continue with this type of thinking until the product has died. Squeeze it until the end, and try and get as much out of it, until it dies. When they do attempt to modernize their product, they try to add things like video, or social media to newspapers on the website. Thus further pushes the newspaper product (a reader based product) away from the newspaper into something else. Fix your product, and stop trying to become the thing that will kill your product. People should look forward to picking up the product, reading the product. It should not feel like its a chore to go through it. Once you get that into the minds of the people who consume your product, it’s over. And that goes for any other media product.
So what should a newspaper be then? What should they do? You seem to complain that they’re not enough like they used to be and then complain that they’re not changing enough.
I don’t live in Montreal but I visit multiple times every year, and I’ve subscribed to the Gazette as my English language link to this city that I love. For years I enjoyed the arts coverage with all the festivals and film events that I always enjoy. That’s almost gone, and that’s criminal in a city that thrives with so much culture. It’s good that there’s one daily columnist, but she often feels obligated to cover news events. The sports department is hanging by a thread-they couldn’t even cover the Grey Cup! No editorials. The national news is something I’d appreciate because so little is written about Canada outside the country. But what we get is the complete opposite: almost everything the National Post produces IS an editorial. The state of newspapers everywhere is sad, but in my opinion they have cut back in exactly the wrong areas and are now duplicating TV news, when they should be employing writers who give you a sense of what it’s like to live in that city, what to do and enjoy and talk about, not just who is going to prison and the latest statement from a politician.
What I mean is improve the sections you have. Not remove them. Make your Saturday edition, or any other edition of the week, feature a long form investigative story on a particular problem, or issue. Make that edition your focus point that will have readers go out of their way to pick up the newspaper. Give the reader a reason to give a shit about your product. And from their begin to repair the long term damages that have been done to the newspaper.
Have the courage to deal with subject matters that your bubble of friends and colleagues right off. And stop being the lap dogs of the powers that be controlling what the current subject should be pushed onto the public. Have a journalist who has no fear turning over a few rocks to see what is hiding underneath. Do not fear being a contrarian.
Kind of like the Saturday Extra?