News

A striking new design now differentiates straight reporting from explanatory journalism, says Guardian and Observer global readers' editor Elisabeth ...

To my mind the designers have deftly signalled analysis journalism so that it is now not only distinguishable at first glance from what it isn’t, but has a positive identity of its own. Is the person on the ground a Ukrainian? The busy reader, the new reader, or the reader who has alighted on a piece from some other part of the web, then has no need to pause to deduce whether the duck is actually some other kind of bird. One reader emailed on 28 February: “I see today a photo of uniformed personnel pointing a rifle at a person laying face-down on the ground, arms splayed … Amid a fast-moving news cycle of complex issues that increasingly bleed into one another, the ability to pause and make sense of them for our readers is even more important,” he said. In November 2020, I passed on the following feedback to senior editors: “The readers’ editor’s office seems to be dealing with an increasing number of complaints over analysis articles that are presented – as far as the reader is concerned – as news. Hopefully these changes address that, as part of a wider effort to innovate in the way that we project and present our digital journalism with different designs and formats.” Like the opinion pages, these pieces are differentiated from news by a tinted background – in this case pale pink – and carry the author’s byline in large italic font. Written most often by a newsroom journalist who is a specialist in their subject, these pieces are commissioned with the aim not of reporting the news but of explaining it. Some might think of it as the “ The change of prime minister in the UK this week has prompted a flurry. But in the past fortnight, regular visitors to the Guardian’s website may have noticed such articles have a striking new design and clear labelling.