Paper Monitor
12:42 UK time, Monday, 22 February 2010
A service highlighting the riches of the daily press.
, entreated the newspaper's editor John Mulholland in a column to readers on Sunday.
How did the paper's faithful respond? With a near unanimous two-fingered salute.
The Observer has not been having an easy ride of late - with suggestions last year, that it . So a lot had been staked on its fresh new look, which was unveiled at the weekend.
Even before it appeared on newsstands, expectations had been raised by an advertising campaign in which a succession of anonymous people - and Mariella Frostrup - were filmed talking it up.
Yes, commented Paper Monitor's other half, but they work for it.
Which is a fair point. But the Observer is smarter than that. It knows that it in this new age of transparency and accountability it's not enough for readers to be told how good something is. The paper-buying public must be accorded the right to say what they think.
The only problem is that newspaper readers, even those of a journal as avowedly liberal as the Observer, are a frankly conservative bunch.
So while Mulholland explained the thinking behind the paper's redesign - which is less radical than might have been expected, amounting mostly to a slimming-down of the paper's pull-out sections - readers were less interested in what had been added than what had been taken away.
"WHERE'S TRAVEL? You're maaaaa-aaaad" commented one reader.
"Oh no what have you done with Neil Spencer's horoscopes?" asked another.
"It was page 8 of the main section before I got to any actual news" said yet another (who, it must be said, seems to have missed the point of the whole Sunday newspaper thing).
And as for the contributor who noted "the content is the same facile drivel", Paper Monitor can't help but think he/she is isn't one of the paper's fee-paying subscribers.
Faithfully manning the barricades against the tirade of invective was the Observer's Janine Gibson, who must have trawled the depths of her goodwill reservoir to thank readers for feedback and vow that it would be read.
But even Gibson dropped the "customer is always right" ethos in responding to the horoscope complaints.
"Was it Kelvin MacKenzie... who fired his astrologer with the words 'As you will no doubt have foreseen...'"
As a champion of newsprint the world over Paper Monitor is just pleased the Observer is still with us - although, had it been a more committed consumer of the paper's horoscope it might have discerned that some time ago.
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