NYT media columnist David Carr on the remake of the cheeky New York Observer, which has produced some of the most amusing reporting about the Apple's media scene.
Reading the new Observer also provides a palpable feeling of loss. In most precincts of New York City you can get away with anything as long as you dress well, and The Observer managed through the years to be the nicely appointed skunk at the metropolitan garden party. The Observer used the conventions of the broadsheet, with its stacked headlines and narrow columns, to play against type: it unleashed a waterfall of improbable display language splattered with exclamation points, ellipses and question marks that created a libretto before the reader even started the article. ...
A caveat: All readers of a newspaper reflexively loathe redesigns. When The Wall Street Journal tightened its dimensions, Chicken Littles were everywhere, saying the paper had been trashed. A few weeks later it looks like, well, The Wall Street Journal.
The Observer redesign, however, is not simply a redesign, but a change in fundamentals, an altering of the product’s DNA.
As a technology, the new format works fine, more manageable, easier to navigate. But as a thing — and the physical properties of a print publication are more important in the digital age, not less so — The Observer has been trimmed in a way that makes it fit in all too well.