What's Next

BEN

It was so small, it wasn’t launched with great fanfare, so it didn’t feel like a huge thing to be doing, except personally. It felt like we were just doing something new and we couldn’t quite believe we were getting away with doing it for The Guardian. But yes, it was exciting.

MARTIM

It was the idea to try to do that.

We were all getting more into management positions in our groups, and we saw an opportunity and we decided to do something – to build a newspaper where the people could enjoy the pleasure of reading a daily paper again, with all the glamour of a magazine. That was the main idea. We didn’t know if we could do it, but the whole point was to change everything. That’s why we didn’t have any sections like Politics, Features etc, and why we used different names, the Radar pages, the Zoom pages, the More pages. That’s why we hired a design director from as far away as Nick Mrozowski in a university town in America. We looked for people in Spain, in Brazil – we didn’t want anyone with a preconception of a Portuguese newspaper.

MARTIM

It was like it is now. I mean, the best paper was Público, the company where I was working just before launching i. Público had been launched in 1990 – it was a very modern newspaper when it launched against Diário de Notícias, the oldest daily newspaper here. They were all classic daily newspapers, you know, those sections: Society, News, Politics, Sports, Culture and all that. But Público is not old like that graphically, and that’s why we needed to go so hard on design.

BEN

I don’t really recall any listings or entertainment sections. I mean, every newspaper had a review, you know, because our newspapers are every bit as templated as any country’s. The idea of The Guide was really to do Time Out or City Limits – that’s where it really came from, Time Out for a daily newspaper. We, at The Guide, didn’t look at the newspapers except to see what they’d done so we wouldn’t do it. The normal way newspapers work – as you’ll know better than I do, Martim – is that you look at what everyone else has done and you say, ‘well, how are we going to do that?’ So, early on, our approach was quite the opposite because we were tiny, so the only way to stand out was to be different.

BEN

Well, we looked obsessively at entertainment weeklies. It was all pre-internet really. The internet was out there, but we had one computer with internet access, so it didn’t really count. We had Entertainment Weekly, old issues of Spy, Might, which was Dave Eggers’ thing before McSweeney’s, old issues of The Nose... American entertainment and comic magazines.

BEN

Well, they were funny. We wanted it to be funny, we wanted it to be amusing. We had 800 words or so for a feature – you can’t go very deep in 800 words. The best you can do is make people laugh. And if you’ve got so many other sections – arts pages and music reviews and cinema reviews and TV reviewed every day – if you’re going to write about the same stuff, you have to approach it differently. So the best approach, we thought, was to attempt humorous.Arts and Culture is what it was originally called, but we thought of it as Entertainment Weekly. That was absolutely what we thought it should be – entertainment not arts.

MARTIM

Monocle was definitely an inspiration but, funnily enough, not with the letters for the sections. They came up when I was trying to feel out what kind of sections we needed and I was saying to everyone, ‘What do you guys think if we just have, for example, a section A to take a journey round whatever is going on; then section B could be something very in-depth; then C could be whatever is not hard news; and then D could be sports, because sports are very important in Portugal.’ And everyone said, ‘Let’s do it, let’s try and find names.’ And then we said, ‘Okay, A is Radar, B is Zoom…’ And the designer said, ‘Let’s keep the letters, too.’ It’s similar to what Monocle does, but that wasn’t the main reason. We took a lot more inspiration from the circles around the pictures and the magazine’s glamorous look. As with what Ben was saying, we were really trying as hard as possible not to do what other guys were doing.

BEN

But why would you not do that? Why would you do what everyone else is doing? It seems to me complete insanity to say, you know, ‘Everyone’s got this on their cover, why haven’t we?’ Well, the response for me is, ‘Everyone’s got this on the cover and we haven’t – brilliant!’

MARTIM

Exactly. Even when there are occasions when there are issues you have to follow, like when you have elections, say. Well, we set out to use front-page illustrations after election day. And we also did it when [Portuguese Nobel-prize winning novelist] José Saramago died. We knew that every newspaper was going to run with Saramago on the cover, so we wanted to do something different. And we won a prize for that cover.

BEN

It was influential because it was successful and it sold – we really helped keep circulation for the newspaper up on Saturdays. As soon as that happened it was going to be influential. Quite soon, The Times did something a bit like it, followed by, I think, The Independent. They took a formula that they’ve stuck with to this day – they begin with 50 best somethings. That wouldn’t have happened before The Guide.

MARTIM

We really wanted to get people who were not reading a paper aged between about 25 and 35 – and in the end, over 65 per cent of people buying i hadn’t been buying a newspaper before. We had an advertisement campaign that said: ‘In one instant, everything changes.’ We tried to make a newspaper people could read free of the newspaper dogmas of before.

MARTIM

Absolutely. That was the reason I decided to leave the management of Público to launch something different. In all the board meetings I’d been to in, I don’t know, 12 years since I’d been an editor-in-chief on some newspaper or magazine, whenever we talked about change, everyone would always say: ‘We’ve had it good so far, why should we change?’ Why? Because it’s possible – if it’s possible, we should do it.

MARTIM

Basically, it started when I was in Paris with my wife, and I woke up and I said, ‘I’m going to launch a new paper.’ I didn’t want to be bored so soon. And she said, ‘Are you crazy?’ And I said, ‘No, I think it’s possible. I’m going to find out.’ And everything went fantastically well and, partly because of the TV and media profile I already had, I raised something like €10 million in two months. Then we put together a fantastic team – I’m not going ever to have such a good team as we had on i – and we came up with a product. We called it Onion at the beginning because we said it doesn’t matter what you call it, we just have to set a trend. It’s like, I’m making a statement because I read this newspaper – I belong to a tribe. And I didn’t want normal sections – that was a very personal issue.

I wanted a small paper, not just in size, but in the number of pages, too. Everything else was the work of a fantastic team.

BEN

I think that with any good magazine, and frequently bad ones too, you can’t separate the magazine from the editor. If you’re doing it right, it’s your personality. So it reflected my interests, my obsessions. It was personal also because we were pretty autonomous, so if we found something we thought interesting or amusing we’d do a feature, we’d stick it on the cover. I used to go to one meeting at the paper and say, ‘This is what we’re doing.’ And I used to go to another meeting and say, ‘This is what we did.’ That’s how it worked. I’d like to say it was all conscious, but I think it was more instinctive, you know?

MARTIM

That’s right, these things are more instinctive.

BEN

We chose to go funny and we used different writers and illustrators as much as possible. We used a lot of Americans because it worked with the exchange rate and they were better at writing short, funny pieces.

MARTIM

Yes, when we needed journalists, we launched a web movement called ‘I want to be a journalist.com’ to find people who’d not written before in newspapers, so they would have a fresh approach. On the website, one of the questions was, ‘Do you have any experience in journalism?’ If the answer was yes, they would just get off the site. I was pretty tough.

MARTIM

It worked really, really well. We found amazing journalists. We gave them creative writing lessons and we never had to worry about copy filled with newspaper jargon. Then we launched a different online contest called, ‘I want to be an illustrator.com’.

BEN

Boring stuff like planning, which I was never very good at. And I probably wouldn’t do it as well because I think I’d be far less bold about just taking a chance on people, so I think it’d be less surprising. Back then I would just call up people doing work I liked. I once called Tad Friend – he’s The New Yorker’s entertainment guy – and said would you write something. He very graciously said no. I would just try anyone. I wouldn’t be able to do that any more – I’d be too cautious.

MARTIM

Maybe I would also have released a Sunday edition. At the time, that was also very personal. I looked at the trend and saw that people in Portugal don’t read newspapers on Sundays – they buy them on Saturdays instead. But I think we should have had a Sunday edition.

BEN

I think a lot of the things that we didn’t do right were actually happy accidents. The fact that The Guide was a cuckoo in the nest was what people liked about it. The whole culture in the UK has changed now, newspapers have changed. But no newspaper would have put entertainment on the front cover in 1992 unless, you know, Freddie Mercury died. To do something new like that today would be much harder because everyone’s doing it. To be given the task of launching an entertainment supplement for a newspaper now, well, that would be a pretty tough one.

MARTIM

I think they should mix even more. One of the things we tried to do was to use different papers in the daily editions so that people would get a different feeling while they were reading, and they would look deeper into the new thing they were touching. But we couldn’t find a printing machine that would allow it in a fast, newspaper environment.

I would love to try a daily paper with different kinds of papers in the same issue. Today, people pretty much follow everything that they used to find in a daily newspaper on TV, on iPad, on the radio, via a phone short message. If there’s an earthquake, you will get the short message within, what, 10 minutes from some friend of yours. So you don’t need a daily paper to know that, and I think papers should change to reflect this.

BEN

Yes, something like the Sunday Times News Review – which I think is a really good idea because it puts things in context and you catch up with what you’ve missed. And it doesn’t say it’s breaking news, because that whole idea is completely outmoded.

MARTIM

I like to see it that way. We used to say that we had the aggressiveness of a daily and the in-depthness of a weekly in the labour of love of a magazine.

BEN

But I think newspapers are taking the wrong things from magazines. They’re not taking the glamour and the depth, and the kind of intellectual rigour you can get from magazines. What they’re taking is the floss, the superficial glamour – and that doesn’t add anything to news. What adds something is perspective, knowledge and intelligence. I think a lot of people don’t appreciate that complex ideas can be conveyed very simply and enjoyably. You don’t need to make them bright pink and frilly. You need the weight you get from a proper magazine, which sounds to me exactly what you were trying to do, Martim