The Belle Newspapers of La Belle Province

By: Mark Fitzgerald After spending a few days in Mexico City last month, I used this space to rave about the continuing revolution in content and presentation evident in the Distrito Federal's burgeoning newspaper scene ("Always On Sunday.")

Jean-Yves Durocher, owner of the weekly Stanstead Journal in Quebec, suggested I brush up on my high school French, and take a look at the dailies of La Belle Province. So the other day, a box arrived with the eight language dailies available for Francophones or Anglophones on a typical Saturday in Durocher's neck of the woods near the Vermont border.

Saturday is to Canadian newspapers what Sunday is to U.S. publishers, and this crop of editions, culled with 14 shopping days left until Christmas, was impressively thick. La Presse, out of Montreal, and The Globe and Mail, the national paper headquartered in Toronto, were especially imposing, recalling the heyday of the Los Angeles Times when -- so the story, or urban legend, goes -- a small dog was killed accidentally by a Sunday edition thrown from a delivery car.

The papers sent by Durocher weighed a combined 10 pounds, all the more remarkable considering that the papers carried only a few inserts, not the half-ream of FSIs that spills out of big-city dailies in the U.S.

Quebecor Media's Le Journal de Montr?al in particular seems determined to test the physics of packaging big numbers of pages and pull-out sections in a tabloid. The A section itself was 128 pages. Le Journal's Saturday provincial edition package included a Weekend section as thick as a typical Village Voice; a 28-page personal finance pullout called Votre Argent; a 40-page real estate/home pullout called Votre Maison; and a 28-page advertising shopping guide.

A 48-page zoned product, Le Journal de Sherbrooke that is published in the longer Berliner format, poked out from the package.

Apart from its heft, though, Le Journal was the least impressive paper of the lot. Canadian papers in recent years have been known for color that pops on the page. Le Journal's reproduction looks muddy by comparison, and there's almost no editorial color outside the section fronts. While the paper generally stays to sans serif headline types, a bewildering array of other fonts and design elements show up in different sections. Despite their themed names, for instance, Votre Maison and Votre Argent have such dissimilar designs that they simply do not look like they belong in the same paper.

By contrast, Gesca Ltd.'s La Presse takes a highly designed approach that uses color and font to help readers navigate the many sections - -the edition I got had 13, not counting a shopping guide and the TV book -- while tying the paper together. The reproduction is flawless, and the layout of pages even deep into the paper reflects a real concern for presentation.

This was not a particularly good Saturday for breaking news. The biggest story was former President Bill Clinton speaking in Montreal at a United Nations conference on climate change. So all the papers except the National Post, which went with a big photo of Clinton laughing with Prime Minister Paul Martin, chose to highlight feature-y images.

La Presse's was the most arresting, a still from the new King Kong movie. The main image takes up the top third of La Presse's long and narrow broadsheet page, with the blue background extending down a single left column below the fold.

La Tribune, published by Les Journaux Trans-Canada Inc., used a similar strategy, with a photo of a hand pouring a beer into a glass forming a big "L" on the top of the page. Like La Presse -- and USA Today -- La Tribune uses color boxes with identical fonts to label sections, but gives it a subtle twist. Each section name is in light-colored type against a background of the same, but darker, color. When it works, the look is sophisticated. But it can be too subtle: The orange-on-orange of the Tourisme section looked like a color-blindness test.

Of the French-language papers, Le Devoir looked to be, despite its well-known leftist political bent, the most conservative in design. It's a handsome paper with an easy navigation -- subverted a little by stories that seem to be unbroken blocks of dark and tiny type. I'll bet it's off-putting even to someone, unlike me, who can read French easily.

Le Devoir did have the most innovative product in its Saturday package, however. L'Agenda looks like a TV book, and it does have program listings, but its full of movie times and leisure listings such as concerts, museums, and theatre. It's real reader service that keeps entertainment information in the house for a week. I only wish I could report it was selling a lot of advertising off the concept. But except for one inside cover and the back cover, the only full-page ad was a house ad.

All the Quebec papers except the National Post had an additional design element that always proves controversial when a U.S. paper tries it: the front-page ad.

On most papers, the ads were small horizontal strips on the bottom of the page. Le Journal, though, turned over nearly a fifth of the Berliner page of its regional paper to a Toyota dealership, and sold an ad nearly as big as its flag on the top of the page.

The three English-language dailies are all broadsheets that lean towards classic choices in fonts and flags -- but they are employed in handsome and intelligent designs.

In The Globe and Mail, for instance, the national paper's famous Report On Business section front looks sober and reliable, but also useful with a many teasers, quick-read graphics of the week's markets, and an Audi ad. But its Weekend Review entertainment section attracts attention with a bold photo from the London opera about talk-show host Jerry Springer -- "Cosi Fan Jerry," the headline reads -- and similar strong photos set off the sports and travel sections.

The financial difficulties of the Asper family's National Post are so often recounted that you might think the paper's full name is The Money-Losing National Post. But if there are indeed fewer bucks at the paper, they are all, as they say in Hollywood, on the screen. The Post is a good-looking paper with a breezy feel to it.

But the real revelation for me was The Gazette, the Montreal-based paper. I hadn't seen it in years. It's lost some web width, and gained a beautiful look that carries off the trick of looking dignified without descending into decrepitude. The navigation devices on the section fronts borrow from the classic newspaper lettering scheme. But these B's, C's, and E's are colorful reminders in the top left hand that direct your eye to the full section name. The Weekend pullout is identified by a thick reverse-type "W" on each of its three sections.

There was no picture of Clinton at the U.N. conference on the Gazette's front-page, but a cute picture of a baby born through sperm donation.

"Designer Baby," the headline read. A good description of the Gazette as well.