i

"The first quality paper to be launched in Britain for almost 25 years" (since The European in 1990? Since Metro in 1999? Charitably I will assume that the error here is innumeracy, not the hubris to claim the Independent is the last quality newspaper launched in the UK). So what's the first edition like?

First (and second) impressions

Like the iPad, the first impression is of a solution looking for a problem that quite possibly doesn't exist. The first two pages appear fundamentally misconceived, a collection of extremely short-form news that looks a little like an index (but unlike the useful bit of an index doesn't direct the reader to the longer versions within) and a little like the front page of a news site (but unlike the useful bit of a website doesn't have any links to read more at greater length). It's almost as if the newspaper's creators had taken away precisely the wrong lesson from the move of news online - yes, people like to read summaries of the news, but then they like the option of somewhere to go to learn more.

And the second impression is of a mish-mash of content without any real prioritisation. There is a sports section at the back but some sports news apparently warrants being up front (Chilean miners play football for some reason). Personally I value the convention that sports news merits its own section so I can avoid it like the plague. There is a business section, in much the same way that all newspapers with aspirations to seriousness must apparently have a business section, but it is so abbreviated and the selection of constituents so arbitrary that it seems to exist merely to give the impression that business is being covered rather than in any real hope that anyone could rely upon it as their source of business news. Last I checked, the FT and City AM and WSJ and Marginal Revolution are still there, so why is this? 

A digital strategy? Not so much 

Let's not even talk about the rookie mistakes they've made online. Not having a website is one thing, but calling your new product "i" just means no-one will be able to find out anything about it via search. I've searched for commentary about the paper today and still the only way I can find it is by guessing which commentators would mention it and manually scrolling through their recent posts. 

Plenty to like

So what's actually to like about it? Plenty. There's almost nothing dull - every story, in its selection, composition and brevity, is worth the glance that it takes to consume and Kelvin Mackenzie nailed it calling the paper "light, frothy, interesting". The advertising is surprisingly attention-grabbing, both in format and selection of companies. The two third-page strips for Orange and T-mobile on pp24-25; the ad for Google on p9 genuinely intriguing; and there's lots of it (more than in today's Independent itself, I hear). Someone has really solved the problem of how to design an ad-funded medium around the users, given the dilemma created by having two sets of users - advertisers and readers - with diametrically opposed needs. Also, my first glance at the TV listings page made me mutter aloud "now that's clever", cos it is - grouping TV listings thematically makes them dramatically more useful (disclaimer - I never look at TV listings, so maybe I am once again being impressed by something that everyone's being doing for a decade). 

The bottom line - "i" will have a very healthy bottom line

Finally, the business model - more specifically, what I infer about the sales pitch to advertisers - is genius. Both Deborah Ross and Simon Kelner talk about the paper's audience as "time poor" and "busy" and here we see a very intelligent piece of commercial positioning. Who is time poor? Well, that'd be people who are busy making money. For 20p they might just be able to snatch a few minutes on their commute, after catching up with emails on their Blackberry and before watching last night's Inbetweeners on their iPad. It's a pitch which, so far, works dramatically well at attracting all the right (high-yield finance, tech) advertisers. As long as they can get people to pick the thing up every day their sales team has a great pitch to make - "time poor" (and therefore cash-rich) people are reading, and that's an audience everyone likes.