Review: The Saturday Guardian

Saturday saw the launch of a new package for the Guardian , with two new supplements appearing alongside a revamped Week section.

Following the lead of Saturday’s Daily Telegraph, the paper now has dedicated travel and sports sections and The Week becomes Saturday. As well as changing its name, The Week now becomes more focused, benefitting greatly from sport moving to a separate supplement. Previously it had seemed a bit of a mish-mash, appearing to be the place where the odds and ends finished up. It now has increased arts and culture coverage and a much improved design and layout. Its appearance is now more modern and lively than before. Its pagination, meanwhile, has increased from 7 (excluding sport) to 12.

Travel has now migrated from a few sparse pages in the Weekend magazine to its own 28-page tabloid supplement. While the subject obviously gets more in-depth features from an increased pagination, travel doesn’t seem to come across as well in plain old newsprint. A magazine environment suits it much better and Travel now comes across as rather grey and dull. There is a distinct lack of colour in this supplement and it just doesn’t look particularly good.

A common problem for producing a separate sports supplement on a Saturday is the lack of sports action on which to report. It also seems to be the fact that they have not had the resources invested to enable the production of in-depth interviews or features. Therefore the 12-page broadsheet Weekend Sport appears to cover a lot of sports in not much detail – much in the same vein as the Saturday Telegraph‘s new sports section. This is a real disappointment because, as it stands, the Saturday sports supplements are merely aping their big brothers in the Sunday broadsheets without having the same amount of results to cover. More analysis and features would be very much welcomed on the sports front.

Overall, although the changes provide a much more focused package, it would have been better if more investment had been provided. As it is, it seems that the Guardian is merely following a current fad to produce monster-sized Saturday editions.

Reviewer: Phill Knightley

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