The Times a-changing for worse with dismal redesign

Nowadays though, new incumbents seek to stamp their imprimatur on the paper in a very public fashion by indulging in redesigns. The latest example arrived this week when James Harding, 39, editor of The Times for barely six months after a short stint as City Editor, introduced a revamped paper to the world.

It was, to say the least, a terrible disappointment. But I am going to say a great deal more because I fear he has made colossal errors that could undermine the status and credibility of one of Britain's most famous newspapers.

He has dismantled some of the good work carried out by his predecessor, Robert Thomson, who managed to correct some of his own initial design mistakes following his 2004 transformation of The Times from a broadsheet into a compact.

Harding's mistakes are of a different order, however, because he has dared to tamper with the page configuration, typefaces and general look of the news pages. The result is a terrible mess.

First off, he has transplanted the heart of the paper - the comment section, needlessly entitled Opinion - by moving the leading articles to page two. I think the Daily Mirror pioneered the page two slot for leaders in the 1950s, and one of my immediate decisions when I became editor of that paper 18 years ago was to move them further back.

Page two is the least-read page in any paper. I could therefore suggest that such a placement is a rational reaction to readers' lack of enthusiasm for current Times leaders - or, indeed, that it reflects the decline in significance of all newspaper leaders - but I doubt that was Harding's reasoning.

His explanation for the move, that it was done "in the belief that a modern newspaper is about information and the ideas that make sense of it" is fatuous gobbledegook. To follow the logic of that argument (as if anyone could), the ideas that make sense of information should follow the publishing of that information rather than preceding it.

Anyway, the absence of leaders from the comment section robs it of its fixed central point and exposes The Times, which clings ever tenuously to its traditional selling point as the nation's paper of record, to ridicule and even a readers' revolt. The next most obvious change is the introduction of wider columns in the news pages and, if I judge right, longer word counts on page leads. This is no bad thing, but it has the effect of making some pages and spreads look too monolithic.

Thomson's pages tended to be busier but I wouldn't criticise Harding for trying something different. Just as I feared when The Times went compact, there is no easy answer to the problem caused by the format itself.

But I certainly cannot excuse the other major eye-catching innovation: the use of italic headlines. There were two on news pages in Monday's issue, admittedly over concert and theatre reviews but they still looked terrible. That eccentricity hardly matters compared with the wholesale italicisation of the dreadful revamp that is times2, a section that now looks as if it has been produced by a different staff for a different paper for a different audience.

The second section is a disaster. From its sideways logo, through its windy, wide, white-spaced copy, past its pointless full-page picture, to its overdressed arts section and a worthless children's page (they never work) and concluding with its splitting-up of a previously coherent puzzle page, it is a sad mess.

Times2 now has 32 pages instead of the previous 24, but most of the extra pagination appears to have been taken up by white space. I cannot believe Rupert Murdoch will enjoy that. In my Sun and Sunday Times days, I recall him screaming about the cost of what one well-meaning but naive designer dared to call "artistic white space".

As for the content, I could forgive the addition of a comic strip, just about, but some page three nonsense headed "the editor's cut" was so absurdly frivolous, both in subject matter and presentation, that it would have been out of place in Closer magazine. That set me wondering. Is times2 a newspaper trying to be a magazine? If so, is it a desperate bid to widen the paper's appeal, to attract Sun readers perhaps? What justification can there be for inserting a frothy supplement into an avowedly serious paper?

Finally, there was one other questionable novelty in the main section, "a modern miscellany for readers wondering about things to do, where to go and what's happening away from the headlines" under the title of the Daily Universal Register, the original name for The Times at its 1785 foundation.

These kinds of pages sound good when first mooted, look fine at the design stage and provide hours of fun for a subeditor or two, but they should never see the light of day. Yesterday, for example, there was a list of the world's 10 highest waterfalls. Why? Did Harding not notice that the Independent on Sunday recently dropped a similar miscellany of stuff that no one really wants to read?

I must finish on an upbeat note though. I liked the sports section. Then again, there were no innovations, no sideways logos, no italic headlines, and little wasted white space. Just as a serious paper should look, in fact.