The Berliner

The Guardian launched its new format today - the Berliner, after the German newspaper of that ilk. It's a sensible size at last - most British newspapers have re-sized over the last couple of years, so those of us still struggling with enormous broadsheets on the tube had polarized into Guardian loony lefties and inveterate Telegraph wingnuts (apparently the latter's refusal to downsize to tabloid format was hitting its sales, too). This was the only social situation in which I've always found my freakishly short arms to be an advantage rather than a hindrance. I must admit that I did start buying The Independent more often after its move to a tabloid format. But it never felt right - it bothered me that people might not KNOW I was a loony leftie with a paper that size. Could just as well have been The Sun (sorry, Terrestrial Alien). The Berliner Guardian is round about the same size as Le Monde, though it folds differently, and the paper is thicker. It has colour on every page, now, which the editor hopes will 'make the whole paper a touch less forbidding' (I LIKED it forbidding!). There is now a 12-page sports section every flippin' day (great, MORE newsprint to forget to take to the recycling). But G2, now about the size of a Mister Men book, is packed impressively full of feature-y goodness, though a bit heavy on articles discussing the size of newspapers. And it's all in a new font - kinda bouncy, kinda swish, hard to place - the child of Times and Courier, maybe? No, it looks nice, and it handles well, not too crumply. What makes me a bit nostalgic, though, is the loss of the old masthead. Until today, when I picked up the titchy little paper and saw the blue masthead, I hadn't thought about how weird it would be to have this newpaper defined by a colour (why blue? why not a nice shade of pink, if not red? can't be a 'redtop'?green, then? - it's like that edition of 'Out of Africa' with the blue cover, that everyone instinctively felt was wrong). The old one was a mix of Garamond and Helvetica, classic eighties design, and I liked it so much that I adapted that mix to use on all my handouts when I started teaching at first! Ah, memories: the old Guardian was kind of an emblem of my Arts student persona in a series of flats full of chemist flatmates; it was my Sociology-studying, Newcastle Brown Ale-swigging, henna-haired room-mate in first year that got me into The Guardian. Used to go down a storm at meetings of the European Society, whose chair regarded himself under-privileged because he'd grown up in a house that was the only one on his street without a swimming pool in the garden.