Why Saturdays are the new Sundays

Saturdays are on the verge of overtaking Sundays as my favourite morning of the week. It has nothing to do with the length of the lie-in, the quantity of tea consumed or what’s on T4. Instead, it all rests on what there is to read over those extra cups of Earl Grey.

Six new sections: the redesigned Saturday Times

Thanks to the heady combination of The Observer, the Sunday Times and the Mail on Sunday, I have always considered the day of rest to be my favourite day of reading material. But since its relaunch in January, the revamped Saturday Times has been giving these Sunday stalwarts a run for their money (and not just because it’s cheaper).

In its new incarnation, the paper’s previous skinny supplements have been amalgamated into one big Weekend section, Mail on Sunday style. It has also introduced the excellent Saturday Review to cover arts, books and culture, and The Times Magazine has had an injection of popular culture (and pink headlines) with the punchy new Radar pages. It’s even managed to do all of this without compromising the calibre of writers that made me love the paper in the first place.

But one of the most interesting additions is “Crunch time: A story in data” in The Times Magazine. Every week, Jonathan Richards and Julian Burgess devote a page to a colourful, computer-generated representation of raw facts and figures, whether as a graph, a chart or a Wordle. More often than not, these digital visualisations create stories that would never have made it into print if they were reduced to words: the relative size of Britain’s shopping centres to Wembley’s football pitch or the distance covered in ten seconds by pedestrians in different cities don’t mean that much until they’re given a graphical lease of life.

"Crunch time: A story in data" from The Times Magazine

We all know that journalists have to be multitalented, multiskilled, multimedia wizards to survive  as part of the modern press corps, and journalism training today is dominated by breaking and reporting news online, whether through blogging, podcasting, vodcasting or social media. But this is a rare example of how digital devices can be employed to excellent effect in something other than news reporting. It shows how data and digits can fit alongside features, work wonderfully with good old fashioned print and give statistics some sparkle.

What it needs to keep sparkling, though, is a constant stream of new ideas and interpretations. In its seven-week lifespan, its creators have already resorted to using a Wordle twice (slightly old news, Saturday Times?), so let’s hope the team behind “Crunch time” has enough computing creativity to keep the concept going.