A fond farewell

To those of you who are discovering our new website: welcome. The aim is for it to be leaner and faster, but in the rejig we have had to drop some items that we’ll miss. One I will particularly miss is Night & Day, the Spectator Arts Blog, which was brilliantly run by Simon Mason and Scott Jordan Harris.

I’d long admired their blog before if became part of The Spectator. Simon was a pioneer of Twitter commissioning, by which he’d he follow writers he likes and, when they expressed a view on arts and books, he’d ask them for a blog. Such is his charm that they usually oblige. He came under our umbrella for very little pecuniary gain, and soon put together an all-star cast for the site, and particularly Night & Day’s excellent Spotify Sunday feature. I personally learned much about what to see, what to listen to, and what to read from the blog — it was on Scott’s recommendation, for instance, that I picked up Clive James’s brilliant autobiography, the best book I read that summer.

But when we drew up the new website, we had to decide: did we want a great number of varied blogs, the type of mass ensemble that other newspapers put together? Or did we want to do less, better? We went for the latter, and given how few of us there are at The Spectator it is the only option. This redesign focuses on just four components: the magazine, Coffee House, our guest bloggers, including Steerpike — our new gossip column — and the Books Blog. Our arts coverage will be that from our excellent arts section, and I felt that we couldn’t have the luxury of two types of arts coverage: the magazine’s and Night & Day’s.

I’ll continue to read Simon and Scott as a fan, and am sorry to lose them. And I’m hugely grateful for all the work which they, and their many contributors, have put in over what will — when they make the Social Network-type film of its success — be called ‘The Spectator Years’.