European weeklies we like

Newsweeklies are all the rage in Europe these days. In Paris, where readers increasingly turn their backs on dailies, a weekly newsmagazine is the correct way to spend an hour on a sidewalk cafe. And new players enter the game. In Great Britain, The European has shed the old format in favour of a magazine/tabloid look. In Germany, the elegant Die Woche cuts into the readership of Die Zeit. The hunt is on.

When Robert Maxwell launched The European in 1990, eight years after the first issue of USA Today, the goal was to go daily. The weekly broadsheet certainly looked like a daily, and the reporting more often than not lacked the qualities found in newsweeklies. But Maxwell’s dream was to stay a dream; the paper was a strange mix of news, written from a very British point of view, and obsequious interviews with European political heavyweights.
Some time back The European changed ownership. European Press Holdings, owned by the Scottish Barclay brothers, took over, with different ideas on how to turn the weekly into something more attractive to readers. The same media company later bought The Scotsman (a daily with headquarters in Edinburgh), Scotland Sunday and Evening News, as well as the pink weekly Sunday Business, a broadsheet produced in the same offices as The European, in London.
The new owners recognised one big flaw in The European – the weekly was seen as a daily, which gave it a very short shelf-life indeed, compared to The Economist, Business Week and others. They decided to give The European a more magazine-like look, and to give the reporting a business focus.
In June 1997 The European changed its format to tabloid, and in January 1998 also changed printer, went from offset to heatset, got full colour throughout the magazine, stitching and trimming, thus permitting the magazine to print bleeds.
– I think we probably still suffer from the memories of Maxwell, says John Belknap, art director at The European. John Belknap is American, formerly at the art department of the New York Times.
– We get quoted more often in the US, and the American papers regularly pick up our stories. In Britain we’re still considered a bit suspect.
For a weekly with more than 50 % of its readership in Britain, this is a handicap. And although ads in The European tell about an increase in readership in 1998 of 106 %, the circulation stays around 130 000 copies a week. Rumours are circulating about cutbacks, perhaps even folding. The change from broadsheet to tabloid might not be enough: perhaps The European will go all the way, i.e. shrink to magazine format, or A4.
The design and look of The European has at least one foot firmly planted in the powerful tradition of Brit tabloid design, and is the result of the joint efforts of freelance designer Ally Palmer, Edinburgh, and art director John Belknap.
The body text is set in reliable and modern Charter (by Matthew Carter 1987). News headlines and captions are set in Interstate (by Tobias Frere-Jones 1993), the powerful, black typeface, originally cut for use on US Highway signs, creating a nice contrast to the fine lines of the Bodoni-revival Arepo (by Sumner Stone 1995). Arepo is used in headlines for analyses and background pieces, and in the lifestyle/artssection, named ”Zeitgeist”. Sometimes, even Interstate Bold is used as a sidebar text face, something I would hesitate to do myself. In The European, however, it seems to work.

The covers of The European make bold use of type and colourful art – one of the best is the one featuring the Skoda-VW-story. As often is the case with excellent covers, it was born on the spur of the moment.
–We didn’t have time to get any artwork done, explains John Belknap. The photos were not good, and I was out of good ideas. Then someone started to tell Skoda-jokes. I didn’t know these old British car-bashing gags, so I got the editors to tell me some. One of them was ”How do you double the value of a Skoda?” You fill it up with gas!” I converted that into the cover.
Will The European continue to shrink to magazine-size? Designer Ally Palmer hopes not.
– I love these big pages, he says. The problem is in the distribution, where vendors often don’t know where to put it. But I would hate losing the design possibilities of the tabloid.
The size of the tabloid pages let John Belknap’s staff switch between a four, five or six column grid. The headline typography spells power, not elegance: a conscious choice of the design team. Pictures too often show (male) politicians and houses, stock photos are common – but then, that is the usual problem with newsweeklies. How to be up-to-date and yet avoid printing photos that readers already have seen in all the other media?

This year the German weekly ”Die Woche” celebrates its fifth anniversary. It was founded 1993 by the dynamic editor Manfred Bissinger, formerly of the German newsweekly Stern, where he also collected several members of Die Woche’s staff.
Hamburg is known for its publishing industry. Der Spiegel, Stern, Bild-Zeitung, Die Zeit – they are all produced in Hamburg. This is the city that saw Axel Springer rise to power and glory. By comparison, Die Woche, owned by Jahreszeiten Verlag, is small fry. With a circulation of 150 000 copies per week, it’s a long way from threatening big, broadsheet rival Die Zeit, 470.000 copies per week.
But Die Woche, with its dark blue Pegasus on the front page logo, is looking good. Die Zeit, even after a recently updated design, looks its age (53) beside Die Woche. One reason is that Die Woche has something that Die Zeit lacks: colour. The colour palette of Die Woche is simply the most sophisticated and elegant of any contemporary European paper printed on newsprint on an ordinary offset press.
– It took us two years to get it right, says Die Woche’s art director Dirk Linke. The first year the printing was horrible – the colours changed every issue. We still, at least once every year, go through it and change two or three percent of the CMYK-mix of some of the colours. Not in order to change the palette, but to fine-tune and keep it consistent.
It’s very obvious from the look of Die Woche that the art director and the staff have a common background in magazines. Die Woche uses magazine design in a tabloid format, on newsprint. The effect is a smart, yet ”newsy” look. Although sometimes the art department tends to use cut-outs and shadow-effects a bit too much for my taste.

The use of type is excellent. Factor Design, a German design company, made a version of Eagle Bold (by Morris Fuller Benton 1933) for Die Woche, which together with Janson (by Nicholas Kis 1690) is the only typeface used in Die Woche.
– Two typefaces are enough for any magazine, says Dirk Linke.
A Swedish reader might find the long columns of text a bit hard to get through, as we are used to newspapers breaking up the copy in smaller chunks, more easily digested – at least according to traditional Swedish newspaper design.
– I hate breaks, says Dirk Linke. If the editor wrote the article that way; OK. But to change it afterwards, and break the flow of the text just to improve the look, that is something we never do.
The super-simple five-column template of Die Woche, with headline and photos in the centre, large & slender initial caps and a nice balance between the sans serif and Janson, is easy to work with and allows the reader to concentrate on the content – not strange layout solutions. But sometimes the concept of ”one page – one article” gets a bit tiresome; as a reader you long for a change in the rhythm.
– I would like to have pages with a lot of smaller pieces, says Dirk Linke. We need more space; with 20 more pages this would be easier to achieve – to break the somewhat ”big-block” feeling when you leaf through the paper.
But then again, to add 20 more pages would make it as thick as Die Zeit. And maybe that would be a step in the wrong direction. Perhaps in the past newsweeklies in Germany were supposed to look like Die Zeit, like German politicians were supposed to look like Helmut Kohl. Not any more.

PS: Both The European and Die Woche are now defunct. Before their time, bad management or just too much competition? Who knows. Bad design? Not at all. But it shows that design is not the only thing important for success.

Published in Aviserat issue 3, 1998