Readers' Ombudsman: Look on the bright side of page 3 – in terms of colour and content

Published on Sunday 15 June 2008 22:09

SOMETIMES we forget to question the way we do things. We just carry on doing what we do in the accepted orthodoxy. Luckily, we have readers who question the way we do things. Jenny MacLaren wrote in to give some feedback on the changes we have made to the paper, and brought up an issue that is in the changed paper but was also a feature of the paper before the revamp.

"My only quibble is the habit of continuing the front page story on page 4. Page 2 is an index but why not continue what is presumably the most important article on page 3?" she wrote.

"Is the reader meant to ignore pages 2 and 3 to continue the main article or is he/she supposed to be diverted to the snippets on page 2 and the less important stories on page 3?"

A very interesting point. Page 3 is a page that gets treated differently, and always has in my time in newspapers. If you look, every national newspaper does it.

The industry orthodoxy is that page 3 is used to give readers a bit of a break from the (usually) heavy and often tragic stories that dominate the front page. It is usually a bit of a lighter story, or a story with a very human or quirky element.

Colour and the production of newspapers also plays a part. Page 3 invariably has colour, so is an ideal display page for good pictures and graphics. Due to the way we configure our press and the paper, to give us colour where we think it is most needed, we often do not get colour on page 5, where we tend to spread (industry speak for doing the same story over two facing pages) the day's main story.

Before we revamped the paper, we did have the option of doing a spread on pages 2 and 3 if we thought the story was dramatic enough or because there were dramatic pictures that only worked in colour. That was done very rarely though; the thinking being that it would have to be an extraordinarily compelling argument to give the reader the same story across the first three pages of the paper.

Now, because we have the index page on page 2 – which carries puffs on lighter stories and supplements in the paper, as well as online – there perhaps is less need to vary the diet, but I still think it might be a bit much to have the same story on pages 1 and 3 every day.

Production issues also play a part in a complaint from another reader. John Nicholson posted a comment on our website concerning our coverage of the deaths of three soldiers in Afghanistan last week.

"I find it really shameful that The Scotsman could only give a brief mention of the death of three of our brave soldiers in Afghanistan. To relegate the coverage to page 10 is shameful and disrespectful to our troops."

We would never want to do that, both as professionals and as human beings. Mr Nicholson must have bought our second edition, where the story did indeed appear only as a few words on page 10.

The reason for that was the story broke after our first edition had been printed and just as our second edition was going to press. We only had those brief few words from the wire and very little time to get them in to the paper. Because that page contained changes, it was quicker to put the story on that page rather than go back and change another page.

Although we could be reasonably certain more information would come in, we had no idea when that would be, and we need to get editions off the press at definite times. For the next edition, more details had come in, and the story was promoted to the lead item on Page 6 with a headline and write-off on page 1.

Thank you to readers who responded to my appeal for information on Videoplus usage. There was a huge response and it is clear it is a service many readers find invaluable, so there are no plans to change it. And an apology for the wrong phone number given out last week.

&#149 Contact Ian Stewart on 0131 620 8633, or at [e-mail] or 108 Holyrood Road EH8 8AS.