i, the new spin-off paper from The Independent, is a breath of fresh air: snappy design enhancing snappy news and a sensible cover price that even the meanest of meanies shouldn’t find troubling. It is one of the few genuinely creative responses to the development of web-based media that we’ve seen from print.

The paper’s owner, Alexander Lebedev, took the Evening Standard into the free sheet market to counter but also to take advantage of the market created by Metro. But i is altogether more innovative – choosing to compete with web-based journalism by doing ‘in brief’ better than the web can manage. You don’t need to navigate i – the paper is laid out in an accessible grid of convenient size with more detailed, but still short (400 words of fewer) articles. Here the web struggles because of the limitations of the screen. On the move, as impressive as the i-Phone 4 undoubtedly is, it is more cumbersome to take in a news website than it is to get the gist of stories from i‘s format. i is quite simply quicker.

i will be too superficial for quality press snobs and those able to read their paper at warp speed – though in my experience many of these people forget the detail as quickly as they skim it. That said these people are not the market. Lebedev’s punt is that there is a tier of people who want to take in a broad sweep of news and culture, largely while on the move or squeezed it into short breaks. Given that many of these same people spend their lives staring at screens, looking at a paper might be a healthy change. It is too early to say if an i world view is entirely absent – but there is much less room for editorialising than in conventional papers. Anyone who suggests that this is not quality journalism has never tried writing for a paper.

Everything in i is abbreviated – there is even a five clue cryptic crossword, which when you think about it is quite enough of that sort of thing! As someone who never warmed to The Independent, I was ready to be under whelmed by i, but quite the opposite. As a zeitgeist briefing i is ideal – just what you need to know. In the Starship Troopers media age, do you want to know more?

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