The Independent C/D

This is exactly what concerned me when I read it. Most of the time I agree with what it says but the execution is hamfisted and brash. The other thing I can't quite make my mind up about is the way it's very wishy-washy about where it's going. While it's nice to have a (kind of) unbiased paper, yesterday's documentation on the hunting bans seemed pretty pointless. I did like how on the day of Charles and Camilla's engagement announcement, their front page decided to forego the story and display "the news you may have missed". Childish, I know but funny all the same.

Have to say it's the paper I buy most often though. Also: the coverage of environmental issues is excellent.

AAAAARGH DO NOT GET ME STARTED ON ANDY FUCKING GILL!!!!!

Seriously, not only is he probably the worst music writer in the country right now, he also has the worst taste. anyone who's ever read any of his opinions on a) hip-hop (or indeed any music made by black people), or b) Tori Amos, will be able to confirm this. Total rockist, too. Comes across as an utter cunt.

I sometimes like the Indie's front pages, but their insistence on treating their leads as MASSIVE SPLASHES all the time means that although they do have the occasional front page which absolutely floors me (eg the one after the US election, which nearly made me cry), they haven't realised that there is simply not going to be a story which merits such focus every single day.

The Independent on Sunday can feature some really hideous writing.

The Torygraph still has the best sports section, mind.

At the time the Independent also had a pro-European bias that was so unquestioning and extreme in its fanaticism that even I (as a then-Europhile myself - I've subsequently become a little more agnostic on the subject) I found extremely irritating. The double strands of pro-Europeeanism and pro-Majorism resulted in a rabid determination to believe in and trumpet Lamont's notorious "green shoots of economic recovery", all rather satisfyingly blown out of the water on Black Wednesday leaving the credibility of both the Tory party and the Independent so badly damaged that neither have ever completely recovered.

I switched to the Times which is at least (more or less) honest about its political allegiances, even if they are not mine.

(ducks)

They sound great. I'll vote for them.

I think The Independent is the best newspaper we've got. That isn't saying much, but it'll do. The Guardian got alarmingly New Labour at one point, I don't know if it has ventured back to the left since.

hmmm...

I am everything you despise.

I'm sounding more and more like a stereotypical Independent reader ('cept for the lib-dem thing). Out of interest, why is a city-break worse environmentally than a holiday anywhere else??

I think I'm going to embrace my inner middle-class person, rather than reject him. I didn't realise he was thriving quite so well.

Well, obviously it *did* (in, say, 1789...) -- it meant things like social justice, universal law, blah, workers control, ect. It didn't mean banning fox-hunting. Or if it did, that was fairly low down the list of priorities.

Of course city breaks aren't 'worse' than other holidays, but aviation fuel is aviation fuel, and the Indie editor's focus on this as 'what his readers do' was interesting in context (SUVs are teh evil!).

Well, okay then, it means whatever you choose to attach to it, if you choose to attach (and be attached) to it. It means nothing to me. So you're left wing...are you a Stalinist, a Trotskyite, a Marxist-Lenninist or Tony Blair? Try telling me that all of those ideologies have something in common. The attempt to draw a line from left to right in some imaginary political spectrum is doomed to failure.

I'm aware that all of the above is stating the obvious, by the way.

Yup... but if you were a member of certain social movements of that time, it also meant cutting people's heads off. Most lefties (err... didn't I just say that term didn't mean anything??) that is..most self-identified lefties don't go in for that sort of thing nowadays. And I'm not sure that anyone holds up Robespierre as the embodiment of social justice.
I take your point - but for the most part its a pretty lazy definition. Which is why I don't feel that describing anything as 'left-wing' means anything at all.

Right...I get what you're saying now. Personally, the closest I get to an SUV is when the bus I'm on is stuck behind one but apart from that I'm scarily close to this Independent reader stereotype.

The only thing, though..when did 'liberal' come to mean 'middle-class'? I mean, when did the fact that I don't eat cows come to mean that I'm a ritch bitch?? How much IS considered middle-class these days? Is 12 grand middle class??
I'm not having a go at you, by the way, this is something I see quite a lot and I don't know why the two terms are used interchangeably, except that its convenient when people are trying to de-bunk the validity of environmentalist or vegetarian ideas.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/apr/10/theindependent.independentnewsmedia

^^ god knows what this will be like. alton is a hack and, politically, a minnow who handed over the observer to the neocons -- it had been a pretty good paper once, under hutton (and hutton's dep who actually edited the thing, name escapes me). how his steez will square with the pic-of-dolphins-plus-'CRUELTY'-era indie should be intersting.

is the indie still broadsheet size? cos that's pretty handy around the house.

no -- it might even have been the first to go tab.

that or the times.

shit so what's left in broadsheet? the guardian's shite for containing mess

the torygraph stands alone

i will be purchasing that in my weekly online shop then

FT as well. If the good lord intended you to read it in a leather armchair in your gentlemen's club then it needs to stay broadsheet.

oh yeah the FT. i never think of that as a newspaper, being economincally illterate and all that.

I think it'll probably turn into the daily version of the Observer in all honesty. The 'pictures of forest fires plus MELTDOWN' Indy isn't really a strong enough brand in its own right for its owners to get precious about.

I mean the Observer's news section has got flimsier and flimsier over the last 3-4 years and that approach would suit the Indy's whole look and feel and under-resourced newsroom pretty well.

there's also the possibility of indie and sindie merging rite?

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-despite-these-riots-i-stand-by-what-i-wrote-1608059.html

My column reported on a startling development at the United Nations. The UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights has always had the job of investigating governments who forcibly take the fundamental human right to free speech from their citizens with violence. But in the past year, a coalition of religious fundamentalist states has successfully fought to change her job description. Now, she has to report on "abuses of free expression" including "defamation of religions and prophets." Instead of defending free speech, she must now oppose it...

...An Indian newspaper called The Statesman – one of the oldest and most venerable dailies in the country – thought this accorded with the rich Indian tradition of secularism, and reprinted the article. That night, four thousand Islamic fundamentalists began to riot outside their offices, calling for me, the editor, and the publisher to be arrested – or worse

There is no "UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights". In fact there are currently 36 Special Rapporteurs, whose various mandates include "Human Rights Defenders", "Protecting Human Rights while Countering Terrorism", "Freedom of Opinion and Expression", and, yes, "Freedom of Religion or Belief" - appointed in 2004.

ooooh

(though if it involves writing politics-themed ~erotica~ i do not want to know)

not gonna lie, when i first saw that url the thought crossed my mind that it might be...miliband slash

To be fair (if one must), there's a difference between underage and pre-pubescent, and to my mind "paedo" equals the latter, not the former. And besides, he waits until his brother's 16 birthday before the fucking and pimping takes place. It's a deeply moral work!

If the protagonist is over the age of consent, then in what respect is the story "paedo"?

I retract then Mike: I didn't read very far before realising it was unlikely to make my Friday morning appreciably better. So it's just incest prostitution porn, is it?

Better than that: it's BLACKFACE incest prostitution porn.

Does he credit his sources?

Weirdly, he wrote a Guardian piece in 2002 about incest which kicks off with a conveniently juicy friend-of-a-friend anecdote.

I think the letter's basically okay, but then I am biased (see above). I wish he'd written this letter first, though, rather than those two awful non-apology apologies.

The Wikipedia stuff is just weird.

http://theorwellprize.co.uk/news/the-orwell-prize-and-johann-hari/

On the afternoon of 14 September, a courier returned the plaque which had been awarded to Johann Hari on winning the Orwell Prize for Journalism 2008. There was no note of explanation. The prize money (£2000) has also not been returned. The director of the Prize telephoned the editor of The Independent who confirmed that Hari had returned the Prize, which was also confirmed later by Hari’s ‘A personal apology’, published online by The Independent.

damnnnn

that fuckin' guy

tho tbh i think most people in his position would find it hard to scrounge up £2000 to repay the prize money

pleased that they didn't let hari get away with claiming that there was nothing wrong with his orwell prize pieces, when (as exclusively revealed upthread) he lifted one of them from a piece in der spiegel while adding a few fabrications.

The Council concluded that the article contained inaccuracies and conflated different parts of someone else’s story (specifically, a report in Der Spiegel). The Council ruled that the substantial use of unattributed and unacknowledged material did not meet the standards expected of Orwell Prize-winning journalism.

He's a highly paid columnist - I'm sure he's got £2000 in the bank. Orwell Prize people clearly furious at his attempt to beat them to the punch.

http://news.sky.com/sky-news/content/StaticFile/jpg/2011/Oct/Week2/16086562.jpg

Not entirely sure about this.

yeah, it's a bit much, isn't it?

strange that they haven't made the same change to the website's masthead.

http://twitter.com/#!/PeterBradshaw1/status/123692022015078400

i actually think it's visually okay, in a daily planet kinda way, though it should be paired with the picture rather than the contents boxes - i guess 'above the fold' is still a thing w/paper copies, idk

I agree, the masthead with contents boxes are 'weighing' a bit too heavy on the rest I think

Strangely, I noticed the new masthead in the shops but totally missed the news story (which would have interested me).

http://www.illustrationartgallery.com/acatalog/BishopEagleComic.jpg

whoa, that was big. soz.

THE INDEPENDENT (and Boys' World)

http://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/feb/11/independent-owner-considering-closing-national-print-titles?CMP=twt_a-media_b-gdnmedia

Shifting i to a different publisher would appear to be the death knell.

Dead.

Announcing a move to a "digital-only future", ESI Media said there would be "some redundancies among editorial employees".

But it said there would also be 25 new "digital-content roles".

#theFutureIsNow

Journalists losing their jobs is (usually) sad but has anyone actually bought a copy in years? Last time I looked it was flimsy as hell (also while playing up to the Graun-overspill crowd, it also backed the coalition at the last election).

It was a great-looking paper around 2000 or so, it gave a prominence to great photojournalism that no one else did, its front pages always looked amazing, before it went tabloid and effectively started putting the editorial on the cover.

AFAIK it hasn't made a profit in its entire history and eventually the largesse was going to run out, and it was always going to be the first to go in the oncoming print apocalypse.

Whenever I looked at it the i (as in the actual paper copy) I found it far, far better than The Guardian (I know its not quite the same but they shared a lot of the same staff)

Lol seriously?

Yes. The i has, whenever I've looked at it, had quite a few reports that were off the agenda. Clearly recall actually learning something new on most days. The arts coverage didn't have usual faff from the idiots who usually write for The Guardian who seldom know what they are on about, felt a lot better. Probably because they didn't have as much money to waste.

Its been a while - in no hurry to check on this or massively defend this point (The Financial Times arts coverage is better than either). Not a massive gap between Indepedent and The Guardian - both are Lib Dem supporting and stale concerns. No energy whatsoever. The latter is usually way more smug and annoying - as the ILX thread has gone on about it for 10+ years.

I mis-read that as like an ILX thread that has gone on for 10+ years

as the ILX thread has gone on about it for 10+ years

Because no one here read the Independent or cared enough to zing it, bar the occasional pop at Johann Hari or Simon Price. The news section was mostly abstracted and rewritten newswire content, although they did have some good long pieces. They fired most of their paid critics a couple of years ago.

In any case the i itself will continue to be published, and the Independent has had a separate editorial team for the website for some time.

There's a crunch or contraction coming in "online content" as well - most of it is crap and there isn't enough digital ad spend to justify it all existing. If it is, it's being spread too thinly.

Obviously the Guardian publishes vast amounts of smug shit and ropey cultural stuff, but it's impossible to imagine the Independent publishing something like the Snowden revelations, or pursuing the News Corp phone hacking story for as long as they did.

Part of the difference was money and resources, sure, but there was a lack of appetite at the Indy to really stand up on things like this, especially over the last few years.

has anyone actually bought a copy in years?

Without any knowledge that the Independent was under any particular threat, I bought a copy yesterday, funnily enough, probably for the first time in 15 years; I was off for lunch in a cafe and wanted a paper to read, and having already read The Guardian site that morning, it seemed like a fair idea to give the Independent a go. It didn't seem appreciably better or worse than the Guardian, though I am by no means a newspaper connoisseur.

https://twitter.com/JohnRentoul/status/721701176606134272

"Astonishing ignorance & condescension about McDonald's. Where do these people eat? Pret? Until recently owned by McDonald's?"

noted socialist hangout pret

http://i.imgur.com/hNiVAbp.jpg

so astonished rn

https://twitter.com/wesstreeting/status/15495480046

looool

https://mobile.twitter.com/search?f=tweets&vertical=default&q=list%3ATweetminster%2FUKMPs%20mcdonalds&src=typd&lang=en-gb

MPs queuing up to say how much they loved their time working at McDonalds.

"trendy" "falafel" "bar"

https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&vertical=default&q=%22Corbyn%20Value%20Meal%22&src=typd&lang=en-gb

Going by the gaunt, grey figure in his Twitter profile pic, Rentoul isn't exactly a good advert for the McDonalds diet

https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&q=corbyn%20we%20want%20plates&src=typd

is there remotely such a thing as a 'trendy' 'falafel' 'bar' or does wes streeting just think that kebab shops are a bit too upmarket for britain's proles

They are exotic and foreign, and also vegetarian, because only a jessie doesn't want colon cancer

I wished all them Blairite arseholes lived on a diet of McDonalds, processed meat and sugary drinks, at least then you could realistically start nominating your faves for the death list while they are still relatively young.

next thing you know these snobs will be turning down donations from popular multinationals or popular billionaires, the trendy out-of-touch loons

millions of people in this country love ciggies, you trendy snob bastards

I actually have more respect for the old Tory John Gummer, like when he did a publicity pic eating a beefburger with his daughter during the BSE crisis in the early 90's. Well at least he wasn't repping for McDDonalds ffs. At the time it was considered quite a crass bit of politicking. lol he has nothing on these shameless fucks in the Labour party.