Photo: by Nico Smit on Unsplash.
Welcome to the Friend’s new website!
The Friend's new website is now live and ready for readers to explore
As you can see, we’ve been hard at work behind the scenes, bringing the website into the twenty-first century. We hope you enjoy the new look, but most importantly, we hope you find it a great deal easier…
Easier to access
The new design is built to industry standards in terms of accessibility, and should more compatible with screen readers for those who are visually impaired.
Easier to read
No matter which device you use to visit the site, it will adapt automatically to the screen - so reading on the go with your mobile phone just became a lot easier on the eye.
Easier to share
Have you ever read an article and wished you could share it with a friend, only to be thwarted by the paywall? We want to help nourish your online conversations, so if you share a link, new visitors to the website can view up to three articles a month for free!
Easier to stay connected
One of the most treasured parts of the Friend is the Friends & Meetings page. These notices will now appear as an article in their own right at the end of each week’s listing. To protect the personal information they contain, only paid-subscribers will be able to view these.
Friends have previously used the pdf to see these notices, however, the pdf isn’t part of the new site. As an independent charity, The Friend Publications Ltd is reliant on subscription revenue for its continued survival, but widespread sharing of the pdf threatened this.
Some housekeeping
You will find that logging in is simpler as you will just need your email address and existing password, not a separate username.
We’ve updated our Terms & Conditions (a link to which can be found in the footer below) so they’re more reader-friendly.
And finally, there are a few things still under construction…
Firstly, our developers are working to get the 1914-1918 Digital Archive viewable once more. We know how much Friends and academics value this resource, so it will be back in place as soon as possible.
Secondly, when you renew your subscription, you’ll see there are fewer options than usual. This is a temporary page, featuring our most popular packages, which will remain in place until our new subscriptions system is integrated later this year. If the package you want doesn’t appear, please reach out to subs@thefriend.org or 0207 663 1178.
Enjoy!
We invite you to explore the new website, enjoy the fruits of our labour, and feedback on any issues you may encounter. We’re here to help!
Comments
Is there still a way of reading The Friend as a whole as a pdf, seeing it in magazine format (including the advertisements)?
By kazbel on 25th July 2024 - 12:18
I have this question too. I’ve searched the website for a PDF button without success.
By aquakerlife on 25th July 2024 - 12:48
I can’t see the whole magazine.
By Ingrid Greenhow on 25th July 2024 - 13:02
Yes, same question. I like to download it and read it on my iPad. I also like to keep the copies for a while.
By MartinaLiz on 25th July 2024 - 13:04
I now gather from this page on the website that a PDF is no longer available for subscribers. I choose a digital subscription to read the magazine as though I was reading the paper edition. Are you really suggesting that digital subscribers have to open each article individually? How do I see the display advertisements and the Friends and Meetings page? Aren’t the advertisers expecting that digital subscribers will see their display advertisements? Please will you consider restoring a PDF button which only works for logged-in subscribers?
By aquakerlife on 25th July 2024 - 13:08
I like the look, the energy and the approach - can see why a website like this is forward-looking and attractive, so well done for that aspect of the change. BUT - I’m another subscriber who still wants to be able to leaf through digital content as if I were reading the paper version…..Am not ready to fiddle about opening each article individually!
Jennifer Barraclough 25.07.24
By JenniferB on 25th July 2024 - 13:49
I too have a digital subscription: if all the articles are to be available on the website, why should I subscribe? Or are they available only on login?
By HelenM on 25th July 2024 - 13:49
Any answers to the question about reading the whole as a pdf?
By Jenniferdk on 25th July 2024 - 13:59
I am a subscriber but can’t see the Friends & Meetings section
By Lucy P on 25th July 2024 - 14:01
Congratulations! But how do I get to the pdf?
By M Hutchinson on 25th July 2024 - 14:07
I like to read “The Friend” for the Notices and Letters pages. It has meant a lot to me because I am not able to get to Meeting any more. I feel sad that I no longer have easy access to the PDFs of the full magazine and hope they can be re-established.
By heleneds on 25th July 2024 - 14:17
Like many Friends above I also usually download and read the pdf and find reading the articles in the new way really difficult (to the extent that I’ve read one article and given up). I would also like full access to the pdf (and the archive of pdfs) restored.
By simonpjbest on 25th July 2024 - 15:21
My final comment in this thread (I promise) is that until now the digital edition of the Friend has been an edition. Newspaper and magazine publishers know that digital is the future, as digital editions outsell or replace paper editions, and readers expect that a digital edition is a facsimile of the paper. With an eye to the future, when publishing paper editions of the Friend becomes an unsustainable drain on the trustees’ resources, the digital offer will surely need to be in edition format. Yet for the moment, unless you reconsider, the digital edition is not live but dead.
By aquakerlife on 25th July 2024 - 15:46
It’s ironic that in the week The Friend stopped publishing a digital edition, my subscription to the Saturday paper edition of the Financial Times was enhanced at no extra charge to include every day’s digital edition! As you already have a pdf for the printer, why not find a suitable place to publish it?
By paul@dunstanburgh.net on 25th July 2024 - 16:14
Hi Friends. We appreciate that the pdf will be a loss for some of you. We made this decision for a few reasons. The first is that, over time, we expect this to become more of a ‘live’ site, with articles added at times that don’t fit with the weekly edition. Indeed, we’re planning content that probably won’t make it into the paper, since we have limited space there. We’ve designed the new site to work whatever device you’re using, so if you’re struggling here, please let us know. It was our aim to make it more, not less, readable, so feedback on this particular issue will be much appreciated. There *is* an option to read each edition as a whole ‘digital edition’: just go to ‘Publications’ and you’ll see ‘Latest issue’, which will include ‘Friends & Meetings’.
There are more difficult reasons we’ve switched, too. We cannot survive without charging for our content, and we’ve found that once a pdf is released into the wild, it appears in places it shouldn’t – some readers are distributing it, and we’re losing money as a result. There were some ugly (and insecure) solutions we considered to this, but none that satisfied all our other criteria. One of those is the special nature of our ‘Friends and Meetings’ content. Users of that page often have an expressed wish that the information they share is not to be freely distributed on the internet. We cannot respect those wishes while pdfs are being sent outside the subscriber circle. Content that is not of that select nature, we will be offering under the ‘Latest issue’ section of the site.
We will of course keep all this under review. Publishing pdfs for a weekly magazine is now rare, and some would say anachronistic. Our main aim is to make the same content accessible in a way that suits whatever device you’re using. If we’re failing here, please let us know how, with specifics where possible.
By The Friend editor on 25th July 2024 - 16:58
Here’s the link to the ‘digital edition’, for those who like to read that way. You’ll see it includes ‘Friends & Meetings’ and the small ads. https://thefriend.org/publications
By The Friend editor on 25th July 2024 - 17:02
Horrible!
Christine
By ChristineMcNeill on 25th July 2024 - 19:00
Country Life, another weekly magazine, is exemplary in offering a magazine online which is a copy of the paper version and a joy to read. Please look at it. I feel I have to wrestle with the new format of The Friend. I am going to end up not reading it. I used to enjoy browsing and experiencing it as a magazine not a series of separate articles. Very disappointing. I think some of your explanations are rather weak. I wonder what consultations you entered into before making these drastic changes.
By ChristineMcNeill on 25th July 2024 - 19:20
Thanks for the response. I think part of my reaction is based on the lack of notice of this change (unless I missed something in a previous issue) and that there was no upfront explanation of why you’ve made such a significant and substantial change. There is clearly a logic to it however the current changes make the website far less readable than the pdf edition.
If you’re not going to offer the pdf then it would really help with ease of reading if, in the ‘digital edition’, there was a simple link at the bottom of each article to the next article in that edition so that it’s easy to click through each ‘edition’ rather than having to go back and forth continually. For example If I wanted to read Timothy Ashworth’s article and then Julia Bush’s - the only way to do this would be to go back to the edition page and then click on the next article. Ideally there would be links on each page to all articles in that edition so (for example) I could choose to go from the letters page to Friends & Meetings.
By simonpjbest on 25th July 2024 - 19:41
Dear Joe
Your point about pirate copies is well made, but Simon Best puts his finger on the problem: you didn’t tell anyone and so it came as a great surprise, and you’re now paying catch up. So a circular email to every digital subscriber might help.
For Friends who want to do what Simon prefers, if you right click the article you want to read, and open in new tab, then you can switch back to the first tab very easily.
In Friendship
Paul
By paul@dunstanburgh.net on 26th July 2024 - 10:19
All these Friends speak my mind! The new website homepage itself is clear and easy to navigate.
But the absence of a pdf just *ruins* the experience for me.
I can ‘flick’ through a pdf just as I would the paper version - from front to back or back to front; I can linger on an article that grabs my attention, or quickly pass over one that doesn’t. I’m in control. This is not the case with what’s replaced the pdf: I have to constantly go back to the main page and scroll to find the next item. It’s much less user-friendly. And I don’t feel that it’s even remotely like the experience of reading on paper.
In addition, on my tablet, the articles are harder on the eye because:
- you’ve used a sans serif font, whereas the printed version is serif, and
- there’s no white space around the text: each line of text starts hard up against the left of the screen and ends right on the right edge; this is really tiring on the eyes.
Please reinstate the pdfs. If that’s not possible, maybe consider the Exactly format (used by New Internationalist): it’s not as friendly as pdf, but does allow you to ensure that only subscribers can read the magazine.
Thanks.
By PaulH on 26th July 2024 - 13:17
Hi Paul, that’s a very fair point on the lack of warning.
I think I understand the linear way Friends have used the pdf. It is, however, now a very uncommon way to access content online, and I believe there are good reasons for that. We’ll keep looking into ways of improving, of course. If Friends have examples from other sites of a method they prefer, we’d be glad to see them—send us links! I can’t myself find a site that seems to do, for example, what Simon suggests.
By The Friend editor on 26th July 2024 - 15:36
These are my concluding thoughts which I hope will be helpful. I guess that most of us who were urging the editor to reinstate the PDF thought that this was the simplest answer, but I don’t doubt that the editor is right in saying that using PDFs in this way is now uncommon and anachronistic. This is because the worldwide explosion of digital magazine publishing in the last decade has been made possible by innovative software designed to do the job. Have you not researched this?
My principal objection to the solution you chose, sending readers to the Friend website to read individual articles, is not that this is a very clumsy way to solve the problem. I grieve the loss of the magazine format which you have abandoned - and when the trustees eventually decide that publishing the paper edition has become unsustainable, the Friend will cease to be a magazine as it has been since 1843. It will simply be a website.
I suggest that you look first at HTML5 magazine software, designed to work in any modern web browser and therefore appropriate for desktops and mobiles. Unlike fixed layout PDFs, the software uses responsive design principles to adapt layout and typography according to the reader’s screen size. Some HTML5 magazine software is available free of charge, though you would be wise to look for software at a modest price which includes customer support.
Publishing the magazine each week would be a breeze, using PDFs that you presumably send to the printer for the paper edition. Most HTML5 software includes a flip feature, so the reader turns the pages of the magazine using the cursor or a finger. You would simply embed the magazine on the website, continuing to use the paywall to restrict access to the magazine to subscribers only. The result will be an elegant and easy-to-read digital magazine which will continue to serve the Quaker community long after the paper edition is consigned to history.
By aquakerlife on 26th July 2024 - 20:41
If no PDF version is avaialbel, I’d like to cancel my subscription.
By johndaly on 26th July 2024 - 21:57
Again, Friends, could you please point us to specific examples of what you think a better practice would be? We’d be interested particularly in examples that don’t compromise our accessibility requirements, and which mean we aren’t having to publish several different formats of the same issue.
By The Friend editor on 27th July 2024 - 10:52
How disappointing! I wonder how often the PDF was being passed on without payment and how that compares with the loss of subscriptions by people (like me) who need it in PDF?
By GinnyBaumann on 28th July 2024 - 9:20
Hi Ginny. Could you explain a bit more about why you *need* it in pdf?
By The Friend editor on 28th July 2024 - 13:37
Well, this was a surprise! I’m a bit perturbed by the evident distress and annoyance expressed in the comments above. I am embarrassed that ‘aquakerlife’ seems to think you have not already researched HTML5, flipbook magazine software etc. I trust the editor and journalists on The Friend to know their job and to do the best they can with the constraints they are under. I completely understand that by making the magazine available as an infinitely reproduceable pdf file you are giving it away free as soon as someone decides to send it to someone else. The paper magazine will at least fall apart and be unreadable after a certain number of borrowings. Why should The Friend be free? Other magazines are not.
I read several newspapers online on my laptop and phone every day, dipping and out as I need and/or want to. I also dip into frivolous websites on my phone for fun (Tom and Lorenzo for fashion snark!). I’ve now moved the bookmark for the new The Friend website to my ‘Stuff to Read’ folder, and will treat it like a news website from now on, with the same status and probable reading pattern as the other online newspapers and magazines that I pay for. I’m not sure that I will miss the pdf, as it was a pain to read on my phone. I will certainly read more of The Friend more often, as I tended to stack up the pdfs until I decided to make time for them. I think I’m looking forward to this new development.
By Kate on 28th July 2024 - 20:23
Thanks for the new website and the work you have clearly put into it. However, I agree with the vast majority of comments that the lack of a PDF is really awful. I don’t want to have to open each article individually. Like others, I subscribe to other publications that provide a PDF so that the magazine can be read electronically just as with a paper version. If they can do it, why can’t you?
I really don’t like this at all. I am considering terminating my digital subscription now. Given that you say you are doing this due to losing money, that is sad.
I also think you should have given us some warning of these changes, rather than simply foisting them on us. This to me shows a degree of contempt (strong word I know!) to the readers who have been loyal to you for a long time.
By PeterLawrence on 29th July 2024 - 23:12
Responding on why I need it as a PDF: I download it so that I can read it on my laptop offline while I’m on the underground going to work in London. I also like to see the whole edition rather than read it as separate articles.
By GinnyBaumann on 30th July 2024 - 7:16
But I simply want to download the paper as I do every other newspaper to which I subscribe - how can modernising for the 21st century include delivering a worse product than before - this is utterly daft.
By Tolkny on 30th July 2024 - 10:40
The Facility that is being denied is the oportunity to read it off line - when we do not have access to the internet - as I say utterly daft, not least because as far as I am aware done without advance notification or even consultation with existing subscribers, or even an email explaining the changes. Done at what is inevitably an especially busy time for all involved with The Friend - utterly daft. I just hope it does not lose money and put the whole publication in peril.
By Tolkny on 30th July 2024 - 10:46
Most updates to software are usually a pain for a while before their advantages become apparent and the changes to The Friend might be the same - but at present I doubt it. I can read the printed version right through and I could do the same with the online version. There is no way to do that online now. I can dodge between pages and I don’t know if I have seen them all. An earlier suggestion was that each article should have a link to the next one.
Otherwise, I think that I would have to revert to the printed copy (not EcoFriendly) without losing access to the online one. Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be a way of just adding the printed copy to the subscription other than by paying twice.
By DavidHitchin on 1st August 2024 - 19:48
it is really a shock to find no pdf or friends and meetings on line. This was the only reason I re subscribed. Is there any other way I can find out who among the wider family of Friends has died. I have fortytwo years of membership and fond memories of all the Friends I have met along the way. Marjorie Ball York AM
By Marjorie Ball on 5th August 2024 - 14:21
Hello Friends,
I just wanted to answer a couple of questions:
David Hitchin: Please reach out to our subscriptions line (0207 663 1178) or email .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) if you would like to make any adjustments to your subscription that aren’t available online at present.
Marjorie Bell: Friends & Meetings are still available on the website - if you click on ‘Publications’ you’ll see a complete listing of the articles in this week’s edition. At the bottom, there is a dedicated Friends & Meetings article containing all the notices from this section. This is only visible to subscribers when they’re logged in, to protect the personal information they contain.
By Elinor Smallman, Production manager at The Friend on 6th August 2024 - 16:12
I agree that the loss of the subscriber PDF function is extremely frustrating . For me , like others , it makes the whole experience of reading a dissapointing one and much more clunky. Might this be quite a common feeling amongst readers , I wonder ? I find it sad .
I wonder if it might have been have been preserved via an Editorial reminder to subscribers earlier on , because of the financial implications to the Friend not to pass it on . After all Quakers are mostly responsible and honest . This would at least have been a first step , before the decision to remove it ?
By Neil M on 8th August 2024 - 9:55
“once a pdf is released into the wild, it appears in places it shouldn’t – some readers are distributing it, and we’re losing money as a result.” was said as a first response to the complaints about a lack of a downloadable copy.
That means I am being punished for the behaviour of others.
I personally will pay an extra subscription to have a downloadable copy.
I presume as with a paper copy - if I choose to pass a copy to another person - there is nothing “criminal” about that?
It seems even reasonable to post short pieces to social media fora - not that I recollect either passing a whole copy or even an extract on.
The Friend will also lose money if subscriptions are not renewed due to a lack of a downloadable copy.
By Tolkny on 23rd August 2024 - 20:52
Another important missing feature seems to be the capacity to review previous editions on line . I was trying to search for and find an article in September 2022 ,but I dont see how this is possible now ? . If so please let me know how . It used to be possible on the old site I think . This is also a great loss in terms of our subscriptions , and in terms of the website reflecting the history of the Friend . Must we now all archive our paper copies ?
By Neil M on 24th August 2024 - 13:12
Sorry Friends , I got this wrong . I see it is possible to review previous editions after all. My mistake ,and apologies !
By Neil M on 24th August 2024 - 13:15
If you are still seeing this:
one change I would like would be a link to the following article in the print edition. So at the bottom of Mary Winter’s thought for the week, there would be a link to Nick Tyldesley’s article. It would be more like thumbing through a paper copy.
By Abigail Maxwell on 28th August 2024 - 12:58
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