Magazine: will split in two
The Sunday Telegraph Magazine will split into two later this month to become a glossy magazine and a separate TV and radio guide.
The new format has been on the stocks since the paper’s budget was set last December but its launch has been delayed twice, from February to April and now to May, until editor Dominic Lawson was completely happy with every detail.
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"I wanted to be certain it had all the ingredients that I thought were right for it before pushing the button finally and now I think it is ready," he told Press Gazette.
The separate guide will redress the feeling at the paper that coverage of television and radio had been "very, very inadequate, tacked onto the end of the magazine in a very compressed manner", said Lawson. "The biggest difference to our readers will be the very thorough and substantial television guide, twice the size of The Observer’s I would guess."
It will also resolve the long-standing debate within the Telegraph Group about whether both broadsheets should carry big listings guides.
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Lawson believes that, increasingly, people have only one paper at weekends and that by no means is there a complete overlap between the daily and Sunday’s readers. So they should both carry full listings.
Information-led, the A5 guide will have a minimum of 64 pages and will carry a column by TV comic Harry Enfield.
It will be inserted inside The Sunday Telegraph Magazine, which itself will become smaller – closer to the size of The Daily Telegraph’s Saturday Magazine.
Lawson said it had not changed from its heatset, newsprint style since he joined the paper and the feeling was that if the newspaper was to have just one magazine it should be glossy.
Pagination will be similar to the existing magazine so there will be fewer words. The idea for the new content is to have fewer long interviews and more short features.
"It will be more varied in tone, there will be more nuggety, bitty pieces, but it will still contain all that it does now," said Lawson.
Deputy magazine editor Rebecca Tyrrel’s column and that of Andrew Graham Dixon will remain but Private Eye editor Ian Hislop’s fortnightly column is to move into the paper’s Review section and appear weekly. Nicky Haslam and Emily Bearn will have new columns.
Lucy Tuck, editor of The Sunday Telegraph Magazine, has been in charge of the project and both sections have been redesigned in-house. Magazine designer Jason Shulman has undertaken the work on the glossy while chief designer Nick Donaldson, has produced the listings guide.
By Jean Morgan
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