Moving with the Times (The Times)

Member Name: lamorna

Product:	The Times
Date:	01/10/00 (72 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: News, reviews, art, something for all the family

Disadvantages: Takes over the house with sheer volume

Eight sections! The new look! The Times on Saturday.

By any standards this is a lot of newspaper. As a regular daily reader of The Times anyway, I was impressed. This wasn’t, in my view, change for change sake, but an improvement in some sections, plus the new additions.

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· The main body of The Times on Saturday: Twenty-eight pages, remains much the same.

· The Times Magazine: Ninety-eight pages, is in the same format as before, with the regular contributors, John Diamond, Kate Muir, Nigella Lawson, (make-up, not bites), plus a rather damning ‘Feeding Time’ restaurant review by Jonathan Meades. (No AA Gill: That’s Sunday)

· The Times Sport: Fifty-six pages, includes Motoring (No Clarkson: That’s Sunday) and Business.

· The Times Weekend: In broadsheet format and twenty-eight pages, includes Ann Robinson and a sparkly new food and drink celebrity, Jill Dupleix, replacing Francis Bissel as the Saturday Times Cook and Life section. Also included are Country Life, Gardening, Property, New-Mega for kids, an adult Games page and to finish, Philip Howard on the back page tackling problems from family feuds to flatulence.

· A sixteen page broadsheet: With Nigella Lawson again, and regular journalists including articles on Andes cycling holidays, to where Internet millionaires go to play.

· The Times Crime 2000: A sixteen-page pullout in association with Waterstones, featuring the best Crime novels: Past, Present and Future.

· The Times Money: An eighteen-page broadsheet with Anne Ashworth in residence as the Personal Finance Editor.

· The ‘Piece de Resistance’ for myself was the new Saturday Times ‘Play’ magazine sub-titled ‘Going out, staying in, the next seven days’
Film, Music, Books, Dance, Theatre, Art, Opera, Shopping, Games and the ‘best’ guide to the week’
;s television and radio. They are right. It is vastly enhanced.

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'Play' is a sixty-two-page magazine. This could be described as the ‘killer application.’ The ‘Play’ magazine is a good reason to change to The Times on Saturday as a permanent choice. The new, fresh layout of the TV and Radio schedules is a delight.

Paul Hoggart and Peter Barnard remain as TV and Radio critics. Navigation is clear and simple, making it very easy to plan viewing and listening by the hour and the channel at a glance. The magazine to keep for the week’s indoors entertainment.

The Times on Saturday consists of three hundred and twenty-two pages for 60p. First-Class journalists, articles, reports, photography, information, news all contribute to pages of valuable reading. There’s something for everyone in there.

I thoroughly recommend The Times on Saturday, perhaps to those who have a preformed conception of a newspaper that may appear to be ‘stuffy’. Especially in the new, more superior format and presentation, as a newspaper to be read and savoured, not thrown out the next day, but retained to be referred to throughout the entire week. It would be more than a challenge to attempt to read it in all in one day alone.

I now have a crisis. I hear the paperboy trying to deliver The Sunday Times through my letterbox…help…I’m drowning in paper…TEN more sections…I’m fighting my way through a rainforest!
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