You have to hand it to the Guardian. When it comes to dipping their toes into new media they pretty much out do all the other trad news sources in the UK, with on the BBC’s online content coming anywhere near close to navigability and comprehensiveness. And their aggression in this burgeoning (but not particularly lucrative yet) market has shamed many other trad news sources. Does the Guardian Unlimited harm sales of the daily Guardian? Maybe, but I bet it harms the competitors even more.
But with every two steps forward, maybe you should take a step back. People like reading off of paper, and tend not to get their wireless roaming laptops out on the tube home. Therefore G24 is that slight step back. A brilliant idea, which takes stock of their readers and then gives them product. What is the readership for evening newspapers? Predominantly office workers. What do office workers have in their offices these days? Computers and printers. So why buy an evening paper when you can download one as a pdf and print it out?
Well we’ll see why I guess over the next few months. The beauty of G24 for the Guardian is that from an ad sales point of view it is something that advertisers understand. A print ad works in a particular way, and there is much more faith in print ads than online ads. As a competitor to standard evening papers, G24 also has the advantage of going to print the moment you print it. So there is an edition whenever they reformat a page. The 12:00 ones seem ideal for taking to lunch, and 4:30pm seems a smart time to make all the news as up-to-date as possible. Speed of blogs, train readability of newsprint. They also do five different ones, of ten pages each, so if you hate sport, don’t print it out. And it is designed properly, not just printing out a webpage.
As for Freakytrigger, it just gives them more opportunities and outlets for them to filtch our content. Its a win-win situation.