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Paper Monitor

10:34 UK time, Tuesday, 11 October 2011

A service highlighting the riches of the daily press.

Ooh, someone's had a makeover.

Lots of us have been there. You reach a significant birthday, take a look at yourself, decide you look a bit of a fuddy-duddy and it's time for a new you. Or you buy a motorbike.

For most people reaching 40 or 50 is the age where they decide to shake things up a bit. For the Indepedent it's reaching 25.

It has a bigger, bolder masthead, which editor Chris Blackhurst says is "". Take note all you newsagents out there, no-one puts the Independent in the corner.

Although, if the paper is hoping its new, hard-to-miss masthead will translate into more sales it may be disappointed. Lower readership numbers over recent years is probably not down to the paper being the wallflower of the newspaper stand. But, we will have to wait and see. Paper Monitor could be proved wrong.

But, cue quivering bottom lip, the Viewspaper is no more. Gone. History. Kaput. Launched last year, when the Independent had its last Gok Wan-style makeover, the daily supplement promised "Britain's most wide-ranging opinion, award-winning commentary, more space for your letters, the finest writing on cultural matters, a daily essay and in-depth features on the environment, media, science, technology and history". Basically, it promised the moon on a stick.

But in a fit of honesty not usually associated with newspaper editors, Blackhurst admits it's more likely the daily supplement was "put on one side" and "forgotten" rather than read and enjoyed. A much nicer way of saying binned or dumped.

Paper Monitor might have been guilty of this crime itself on several occasions, but is sad to see the Viewspaper go. All of the above features are now said to be in the main body of the paper. But having lost a lot of its middle-age spread and now feeling much more streamline, you have to wonder where it's been squeezed in.

Like so many before it, the Independent hopes it is more "modern, confident, dynamic and sharper" after its revamp. Don't we all, don't we all.

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