More analysis, less hard news in new Screen

Screen International has been radically overhauled after seeing an increased demand for daily news on its website.

Rather than try to keep up with daily events, the weekly magazine has been transformed to provide more analysis and offer a broader overview of the movie industry.

The cover has undergone a dramatic redesign and will now carry a single image instead of four of ?ve news stories. Several new sections have been added inside and there will be more pages dedicated to the box of?ce and the complexities of ?lm production. Editor-in-chief Colin Brown said all the old components were there but “not in the same order”. He told Press Gazette: “The weekly news magazine has been released of its historic role as a newspaper to complement the website. If we look like a newspaper and you are a reader in Tokyo waiting for the news and you see the ?rst headline and it refers to something that happened three days ago, it doesn’t make sense. “We want to reach people who read Screen in a more effective way. If readers want news, they can go online.”

Brown claimed Screen’s online readership “dwarfed” the print product’s, with almost six times as many people using the website than there were readers of the magazine. The online news is updated 24 hours a day by an international pool of journalists in London, New York and Hong Kong. News on the website will now only be available to paid-up subscribers.

The Emap-published magazine will carry a news digest in the form of a global map in the ?rst few pages. The leader column has been moved forward from the middle. A three-page People section, featuring the movers and shakers in the industry, has been added, along with a two- to six-page section devoted to international cinema production – the fastest growing area of cinema today, according to Brown. The production pages will look at the cost and complexities of shooting a ?lm in different locations. “Film making has gone intensely global and no one is covering it in that way,” said Brown.

The review pages will also look at how comparable ?lms have worked around the world. “If there’s a new Hugh Grant ?lm out, we’ll do an analysis on what it means from a business point of view to have Hugh Grant as an actor,” Brown added.