The Saturday Paper Is Now Taking Subscriptions, Could Solve Every Problem In Australia, Maybe

The team behind The Saturday Paper delighted inboxes across Australia yesterday with news that they were finally taking subscriptions, only a few months after Morry Schwartz — publisher of The Monthly and The Quarterly Essay – announced his new weekly print title. Positioning itself as a successor to the legendary, long-lost National Times, the first issue will hit stands on Saturday March 1 — which only leaves one month for it to hit its projected circulation of 100,000, and for Australia’s underfed news media consumers to weigh it down with starry-eyed expectations.

A bit of background: When The Saturday Paper was first announced in November, it was accompanied by a manifesto of sorts, written by its Walkley-winning editor Erik Jenson for The Guardian.“There is no doubt we are announcing The Saturday Paper … in the leeside of a storm that has battered newsrooms around the world,” he wrote. “But we do so because we think this storm has created a panic which forced news organisations to abandon newspapers before they needed to.”

The Saturday Paper, Jensen continued, will be committed to long-form journalism; a print model that will “jam the gears on the internet’s voracious cycle” and speak to a niche audience currently under-served by Australian newspapers. “Confidence in niches is uncontroversial. In magazine publishing, they are a given … But in newspapers they have not been effectively mined.”

Australian journalists, news-lovers, writers and readers wet their pants collectively — they are paying proper writers properly! to write proper pieces! ink-stained fingers! it will smell like ylang ylang, probably! — leaving Jensen and his recruiting team with their pick of the litter. And according to yesterday’s press release, they’ve done an excellent job, rounding together esteemed names across political, economic and world news and analysis — including David Marr as a regular columnist, his fellow Fairfax escapee Hamish Macdonald as the world editor, The Age columnist, political blogger and former Labor Party speechwriter Martin McKenzie Murray as Melbourne correspondent, and the Australian Financial Review‘s Sophie Morris reporting from Canberra.

Similarly impressive, the paper’s pop culture team reads like a veritable who’s who of conflicted interests: The Slap author Christos Tsiolkas has signed on as film critic; The Whitlams’ Tim Freedman and Hoodoo Gurus’ Dave Faulkner will be writing about music; television will be covered by Helen Razer; and the owner of foodie haven Cutler & Co., Andrew McConnell, will be the paper’s food editor.

More names will be announced ahead of the paper’s launch on Saturday March 1, the very same day that The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age‘s Saturday papers both shrink down to a tabloid size. According to Schwartz Media CEO Rebecca Costello, 2000 people signed up in the 24 hours since subscriptions opened, with 70% across print.

For $99 a year, or $3 an issue, the Saturday Paper will be available in delicious print in Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra, and online (and as an app) everywhere else. Subscribe here. Get excited about it here.