Is the Guardian worse than it used to be?

11.28am: David Cameron has said the pro-democracy leader's release was "a travesty" and long overdue.

I wish we had a pro-democracy leader

i'm asking mainly because the lovely Emma B is looking for a weekly politics/world affairs magazine that isn't basically right-wing

I used to write abstracts of NS articles and found that it comments on the news rather than giving you the news a lot of the time. Unlike the Economist, which might be right-wing but at least gives you a clearer idea of what the article you're reading is actually about. The NS is always saying things like "recent goings-on in Westminster mean..." but doesn't tell you what the recent goings-on might be, so you have to read something else anyway to find out about them.

I like The World Today, the monthly magazine from Chatham House. I get a nice roundup of world news and a bit of international relations theory thrown in.

John Lanchester has a great line about the Economist in Whoops!, along the lines of how the first 80% of any piece is brilliant, intelligent and meticulously researched but the last 20% is always: "on balance, unregulated free markets are the answer. The end."

they are particularly fond of the sentence "Perhaps."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/blog/2010/nov/14/sarah-palin-alaska-reality-tv

is the guardian the world's easiest paper to troll? who gives a shit about this except them?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/dec/08/chris-huhne-stays-cancun-talks

"Clegg decided that the long-term interests of the planet should take priority over the government's potential difficulties in tomorrow's vote, said the source."

in case you hadn't noticed, that's the PLANET Clegg took into account: waddaguy.

ha, thought of the guardian when i read this

While we’ve been chasing the “conversation” thing, people have drifted away from news because they’re seeing the conversation as fun and entertaining but not very worthwhile compared to really, really good journalism and really, really good reporting. I think that the emphasis that so many organizations have had over the past few years of concentrating on opinion-sharing has been a massive waste of time and resources – and actually almost a cultural crime, because that time and resources could have been put forth to something that was, you know, much more intellectually rigorous, and would have kept the brand… known for its news, rather than known for… being a collection of mad people.

blog.fawny.org/2010/12/14/hammersley-dld10/

That's very OTM.

God help me though, I instinctively scrolled down to read the fucking comments.

A top casting director once rushed up to me after Hero had sung in a cathedral in the south of France insisting that she hadn't seen that quality since casting a young Kate Winslet.

I tried to read that the other day for the lols, but couldn't get past the first sentence where she reveals she named her daughter Hero. What an awful person.

You should have kept reading, her younger brother is called Tybalt!

Christ. I know it's Shakespeare and that, but it's like she thought she was giving birth to a couple of minor characters for a future Battlestar Galactica spinoff.

That's one article where the comments section is useful. I wouldn't have known who this woman was if the commenters hadn't said.

yeah the four-year-old article she wrote for the Mail that gets linked therein is a str8 banger too

From that article:
Lover One: Steve Peake, 48, the Sexy Snapper, who rekindled my sex life. November 2003.

Steve had pitched up in my garden previously to take snaps of my family for Hello!

And she's worried about her kids being on xfactor?

I quite like the name Tybalt.

Her B&B looks splendid as well.
http://www.stcurigschurch.com/

Sounds like a power tool or some kind of alloy.

I was a marquess's daughter with a privileged upbringing, an acting career and a flat in Notting Hill. Simon was an armed robber serving nine years who'd grown up on a council estate.

But in the confines of the prison walls, our very different upbringings didn't matter. As part of the acting workshop I ran in the prison, he played a handsome Macbeth to my Lady Macbeth.

Despite family and friends decrying the match, after a 15-month romance, we married. We went on to have a daughter, Hero, seven, and a son, Tybalt, six, and bought a disused church in Snowdonia. It could have been idyllic. The problems came when I discovered Simon's drug habit, then his affair.

This is incredible stuff. I just want to savour it before I read any further.

clearly the woman's a dobber, but the CiF feeding frenzy is kinda full of unedifying attitudes and assumptions too

I'm not going to actually read a CiF thread to find out.

archive of Times column: http://www.stcurigschurch.com/sunday%20times.htm

Her ancestor gave us the Queensberry Rules, and bankrupted Oscar Wilde.

I was a marquess's daughter with a privileged upbringing, an acting career and a flat in Notting Hill. Simon was an armed robber serving nine years who'd grown up on a council estate.

But in the confines of the prison walls, our very different upbringings didn't matter. As part of the acting workshop I ran in the prison, he played a handsome Macbeth to my Lady Macbeth.

Despite family and friends decrying the match, after a 15-month romance, we married. We went on to have a daughter, Hero, seven, and a son, Tybalt, six, and bought a disused church in Snowdonia. It could have been idyllic. The problems came when I discovered Simon's drug habit, then his affair.

This is incredible stuff. I just want to savour it before I read any further.

― Matt DC, Monday, December 20, 2010 12:13 PM (5 hours ago) Bookmark

lololololol

That's not a Cif thread, btw. Just sayin' like. Comment is free is the home of opinion pieces. It's not "any Guardian story with user comments enabled".

Comment is free is the home of opinion pieces fucking maniacs.

fixed

PLEASE CAN PEOPLE STOP CROSSING THROUGH THINGS AND WRITING "fixed" IT IS THE MOST ANNOYING PRISSY THING EVER, EVEN MORE ANNOYING AND PRISSY THAN ME.

PLEASE CAN PEOPLE STOP CROSSING THROUGH THINGS AND WRITING "fixed" IT IS THE MOST ANNOYING PRISSY AMAZING SEXY AND WITTY THING EVER, EVEN MORE ANNOYING AND PRISSY THAN ME.

fixed

almost, adhering to guardian proofing standards

and then someone...

YUP, guessed so (xpost)

big link from FRONT PAGE online to this
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/jan/24/view-from-broad-lauren-laverne

She's whip-smart

not sure laura barton is best-placed to judge intelligence

it looks like laverne is the anchor...

also

✤ We are positively itchy with excitement for Portlandia, the new comedy series set in the Oregonian city of Portland, co-written and starring Ms Carrie Brownstein of Sleater-Kinney. It promises to take a wry look at the city's hipster-crafty-leftwing community. Sadly, the series has only just started showing in the US, so we are unlikely to get it for yonks. [continues on p. 94]

It's a very very long way down the front page to the extent that going 'FRONT PAGE' is a little excessive.

fair enough, it is below "the inside track: HARD BEDS". still too prominent imo.

Oh, the Guard comments on the Lauren Laverne amount to "no evidence of wit" from some kettles.

I assumed they stuck it there for SEO purposes rather than because they really think Laura Barton's opinion on Lauren Laverne is as important as Palestine.

I realise it's flagrant zingbait but I'm quite intrigued by the Portlandia thing (which I am reading abt for the first time in the quoted post above), if only because the late-teen versh of myself would be terribly disappointed otherwise

it wasn't so much the show as the paragraph hurting my eyes

yes. she also says 'those of us on this side of the pond' which I think Mark S banned a long time ago

She makes a very valid point about Lauren's deployment versus her experience on 10 O'Clock - the 'hawt blonde sidekick OTMing the nerds' space she currently fills there needs fixing, STAT.

My suggestions for fixing The 10 O'Clock Show mostly involve a rocket and the sun.

good call

Oh dear...

Guardian media commentator Roy Greenslade gave it to The Sun with both barrels this morning over its “failure” to run the news that Sky sports pundits Richard Keys and Andy Gray had been axed in a row over off-air sexist comments.

“…the editor, Dominic Mohan, got it hopelessly wrong. By ignoring the story, he tends to prove the theory that Murdoch’s papers dance to Murdoch’s tune.”

Axegrinder understands that there was much hilarity at Wapping when perplexed hacks realised that Roy must have been reading an Irish edition of The Sun which was missing the Sky Sports tale. Sun readers elsewhere will have seen that the story was in fact splashed across pages one, four and five.

Roy’s misfiring blog post disappeared shortly after the mishap was pointed out. But it has not disappeared from the internet completely, you can see a version of it here.

"Get 'Em Off" was the Sun headline, I believe

has anyone ever described a man as "whip-smart"? also who is the "we" that barton refers to.

btw have we had a thread about that awful show yet? i can't think of a worse example of "omg ur soooo right, u should be president, i agree with u cos it makes me smart" bullshit than putting brooker and mitchell on a c4 show.

It's on a thread about the 11 o'clock show, I think.

has anyone ever described a man as "whip-smart"?

HA. Henry Root used to make the same running observation about the use of "corrosively intelligent" which only applies to actresses apparently.

in a way it is worse for The Sun to hypocritically decry sexism. in a way.

pretty funny given what barton's saying in the piece, "whip-smart" is such a cutesy twee term. why wouldn't you just say "smart"? why "whip-smart"? if you wanted to call someone smart you'd say they're smart.