The Times, they are a changin'

Pity the poor delivery boys and girls of the UK. Yesterday not only did they have to carry their usual heavy load of ever growing newspapers to customers' doors, they also had the added burden of a copy of Jonathan Coe's book The Rotters' Club to cart around for every Times reader to whom they had to deliver. And the reason for this particularly generous giveaway? The Times was desperate to publicise its new redesign. And very smart it turned out to be. Once readers had torn open that fiddly plastic packaging and suitably filed the paperback which covered up most of what turned out to be a neatened up front page, that is.

The main change, of course, is that the paper is now full colour - and about time too. Black and white pages in newspapers are not only less attractive to advertisers but are beginning to look like a throwback to a bygone era.

Generally throughout the paper, there is more white space (white space, of course, being the new black - or rather, the new text). Headlines have more room to breath, and designers no longer feel bound to make standfirsts and other page furniture take up exactly the space provided. At times, this works well, but at others it leaves oddly shortened sentences dangling on the page.

One of the problems Times designers have had since the paper went tabloid is how to make the paper look authoritative without becoming blocky and shouty, and looking too much like the Daily Mail. Thinned down typefaces, subtle and intelligent uses of colour (not least the colour coding which guides readers gently through the different sections) and a lack of picture borders all add to the feeling this is a classier product than the one available on newsstands just three days previously (the Saturday Times will remain unchanged).

Two big changes have occurred, apart from the obvious colour improvement - one a badly needed update, the other a bold and forward thinking move that could force others to follow suit. The former is the features section, which is no longer T2 but rather times2, perhaps trying to separate itself from the very similar, but better supplement offered by the Guardian, G2. The first day was always likely to be a good one, and so it proved here. An exclusive interview with Natascha Kampusch was splashed on the front page, showing that there might be a renewed interest in what happens in the features section from senior editorial figures. The section is also larger, with a much improved arts section.

There are a couple of caveats, however. Firstly, I hope the health spread is not a regular feature. The dangers of forcing journalists to keep writing health stories simply because they pull in readers are excellently summed up by Peter Wilby in his column for this week's Media Guardian. Secondly, note what happens when you click onto this link to the Natascha Kampusch story. Look at the address bar. Go on, and look back here when you've finished. Done now? Good. Did you notice the article is filed under the "women" section of the website? If you want a perfect distillation of how The Times views its features section, this is it. It's the bit for women (hence the health story about stillbirths). But why should an interview with Kampusch be of interest mainly to women? Surely the story of a girl kidnapped and held hostage for most of her adult life before escaping and going on to front a chat show is likely to entice any reader, male or female. This might not matter, were it not for the fact that the male-dominated editorial staff at The Times seem to have long looked down their noses at features (it's not even on the same floor of the building as the news room and editors). Let's hope the fact the article is splashed on the front is more of a reflection of the paper's values under James Harding than the niche "life_and_style/women" section under which it has been filed on the website.

The second big change is that the leaders have moved to page two, which is nothing less than a masterstroke. With this, the paper has solved both the problem of the annoyingly fiddly page two, which many readers seemed to pass over, and the declining readership of leader articles in general. The striking sight of the classic three-leader page on the inside page will hopefully bring readers back to both of these forgotten aspects of the paper, while also flagging up the major themes and issues of that day's news and helping give the news section as a whole greater coherence.

So expect a major boost for readership figures for Monday's Times when they are published. The only problem is, that will have been more to do with Jonathan Coe than the hard work of James Harding and his team.