Well, the cover certainly has a more distinct look than the Mon.-Sat. Star. That's because it's Canada's first maga-paper!
If you're not familiar with the term, it's "a hybrid magazine-newspaper that blends what is best of both mediums," writes new Sunday Star editor Alison Uncles in an editor's note.
To kick off this new look, they chose an photo of a new plant being held in someone's hand.
It's a yearling Kentia palm. The hand model "was chosen for her lustrous skin tone," the Star sez. Lustrous is good, I suppose.
The most prominently played article is one called The Power of New: Why Novelty Sells, by T.O. writer and philosophy prof Mark Kingwell. It runs in the Ideas section.
The content is organized differently that the traditional Sunday Star was (and did I mention there's color on every page?).
Besides the magazine-y cover, there's an expanded index on page two. The rest of pages 2 and 3 are taken up with breaking news. (Page A2 used to be home for Jennifer Wells' column).
The City on Sunday's first story on A4 was actually a feature about something that happened Saturday -- people trying out for the Blue Man performance art group.
Features on imagining a new Toronto and playing touch football. Metropolis, which had its own section once then got busted down, has been apparently been thrown on the ash heap of old newspaper sections. But its spirit lives on in this new section.
There's an abundance of world coverage -- and the Star continues to use three-day-old Thomas L. Friedman columns from the NYT. Grrrr.
On the comment page, there's no Richard Gwyn. There was before. Is he permanently gone from Sundays? I couldn't find Antonia Zerbisias's column today either. Same question.
Three Star columnists I follow regularly are Linda McQuaig, Rick Anderson and Haroon Siddiqui. The latter has been moved onto the comment page. McQuaig, a leftie, and Anderson, pitching from the right, are set up in a pro-con format. In today's pseudo-debate on health care, Anderson's column is to the left of McQuaig's on the page. Details, people!
I don't have last Sunday's Star kicking around, but I'm pretty sure the word counts on all three columns are way down.
The comment pages also have a three-day-old Maureen Dowd column from the NYT and a piece from Thomas Axworthy on how Canada should work to prevent nuclear terrorism. I presume his contribution was a one-off.
Actually, it's interesting in a way that a relaunch of the paper isn't accompanied by the 'permanent' addition of a new voice.
The last four editorial pages of the A book were devoted to business. The usual business columns (Ellen Roseman, the Portfolio Doctors) appeared to be intact.
They promised more sports and they have apparently delivered. But since there's no hockey on, I don't care. Good cover art, though.
Arts and Entertainment has been rebranded Buzz. It's standard entertainment fluff with some added food content (good tips this week on French toast).
But again, Ben Rayner used to write on Sundays and he's not there now. Is that a permanent change?
As a humble media consumer, I wish newspapers, magazines and whatnot would tell me when they're taking something away forever -- if that is what they are doing.
Ideas appears to mainly be a wrapper around the Books section (which pulls out). There's some interesting tidbits in it. One was the new trophy wife, and it's pretty much 180-degrees-opposite to Maureen Dowd's piece on what men want in a wife.
Bizarrely, the new trophy wife story doesn't pull up in a search of the Star's site. Neither did a search on 'Kingwell'. Is all the Ideas content migrating to the website?
On balance, I think it's an improvement. There's a lot more brief items in this paper. I like the use of photos and overall design (I'm not a design maven, so I can't talk about it with any degree of sophistication about typography and whatnot).
I think it should achieve the presumably desired goal of selling more newspapers on Sundays. I hope some of the columnists I follow -- and it's primarily opinion writing that drives my purchasing decision -- are not there because they had the day off, not because they've been dropped.
PS: Why is there nothing prominent on the Star's website trumpeting this makeover of their Sunday paper? The only place I can see an image of the new front page is in an ad and it's puny. Why not have a special section explaining the new paper?
Addendum:
Here are the Torontoist's observations.
Here are some thoughts from Bill "the other Bill D." Dunphy of the Hamilton Spectator, replying to a post of mine on CAJ-L:
Not to trumpet our own horn or anything here, but, as Tanya pointed out, many of the ideas I'm seeing at work in the new "SUNDAY" Star 'first' appeared during the Spectator's Oct 1, 2003 "Revolution" that saw our arts/entertainment/food/lifestlyle content consolidated in a fully magazine sytle section.
And while we didn't give our front page the "maga-paper" treatment, we did go to a big page two index, slightly shorter columns (effectively 20" down to 17") and consildated Local/World/Business into one section with Business grabbing the last four or so pages at the back of the book.
A key feature of our makeover was food, more food and still more food.
Our re-design was predicated on snagging a readership segment that was in a scary decline - women between the ages of 25-49.
I know that the Star's loss in that category far exceeded ours. Re-examine that new paper and ask yourself if that's their motivation....
Oh, and one last thing - Alison is sure to put "ideas" front and centre from what I've heard of her - that should make for some good reading, regardless of the wrapping,
The stil other Bill