The Guardian

2022 - 9 - 8

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Image courtesy of "The Guardian"

How does the Guardian help digital readers distinguish analysis ... (The Guardian)

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.

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Looking at the state of Britain from the US, for once I feel very glad to ... (The Guardian)

It was an unfamiliar feeling of relief: whatever may be wrong with America, at least no one is looking to Liz Truss to solve it, says Guardian columnist ...

The Washington Post [sought cheerfully](https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/09/06/liz-truss-boris-johnson-queen/) to present her as a corrective to Johnson, a happy transition from “a prime minister known for colorful metaphors and a loose relationship with the truth” to “one who offered unadorned bullet points for dealing with the country’s looming economic crisis”. If US coverage of Truss had a through-the-looking-glass feel, figures attesting to the scale of the national crisis in Britain snapped things back to reality. [described as](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/05/world/europe/liz-truss-uk-prime-minister.html?searchResultPosition=7) “a party stalwart, hawkish diplomat and free-market champion” with a “practical, unfussy style [that] could appeal to Britons after the circuslike atmosphere of the Johnson years”. From her record, clearly, she has the gravitas and integrity of a Weeble. In the US, where Britain’s influence dwindles hourly, seeing Truss’s appointment splashed on the homepage of the New York Times triggered a brief ping of excitement: oh, look! One after the other, American media organisations summarised Truss’s task as one of reckoning with “ Whatever may be wrong with the US, at least no one is looking to [Liz Truss](https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/sep/06/liz-truss-says-uk-will-ride-out-the-storm-of-cost-of-living-crisis) to solve it. Over on NPR, [analysts asked](https://www.npr.org/2022/07/14/1111595703/what-broke-britains-economy): “what broke Britain’s economy?” [overruled Roe v Wade](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jun/24/roe-v-wade-overturned-abortion-summary-supreme-court), or in the wake of yet another school shooting, the choice to live in this country when there are better alternatives seems at best eccentric, at worst actively mad. Cometh the hour, cometh the woman; Britons could only laugh hysterically on Monday and rock back and forth. That someone of Truss’s abilities should be in charge at this dire moment of British history makes her seem, in defiance of political physics, even worse in some ways than her predecessor. It is a common refrain among foreigners living in the US, one that comes round like clockwork whenever something bad happens: what are we doing here?

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