Too many sections
After flirting over the years with various newspapers – most notably The Independent and The Guardian – I’ve recently gone back to The Times. I love its writing – crisp, original, providing enough detail to make you feel well-informed without leaving you overwhelmed with information. Just like a good proposal, I guess.
But its structure? Oh my goodness! Inserted inside the main paper last Friday was the “Arts & Ents” section. Inside that: the “Mindgames” supplement. Next came “Bricks & Mortar”. Inside that – in this bizarre Russian doll of a newspaper – “the game”, their soccer update (its title in supposedly-trendy lower-case). Inside that – a separate listing of the coming season’s football fixtures. None of these were separately bound or stapled, you understand – just six different sections within the overall paper, needing to be separated out from one another before any individual component could be enjoyed without interruption.
I can guess where the problem arises: each area of content doubtless has its own editor who wants the glory of a separate section rather than seeing their material blended coherently into the overall document. And production lead times may play a part, too. But the result is a total mess – feeling like it’s structured for the writers rather than the readers. And there’s a lesson in that for those of us who develop proposals.
This article was written by Jon and filed under Musings. If you found it useful, you can with others. To receive automatic updates, subscribe to The Proposal Guys via 
RSS or 
Email.
No Comments »
RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URL
