Is the Guardian worse than it used to be?

I used to see Laverne all the time in Newcastle in early Kenickie days and even after that occasionally. She's funnier in real life.

even with my dark past as a twilight-of-indie kid im not standing up for laverne now, but she is the doyenne of self-satisfied 'alternative' people who-you-would-think-were-ilx-strawmen-but-really-really-exist and listen to xfm.

her weirdly noncommittal 'be sarcastic-ish about EVERYTHING' tone is so so so prevalent. even stuff these people actually like, like the arcade fire and 'little miss sunshine', they still have to make it a quirky 'thing'.

her weirdly noncommittal 'be sarcastic-ish about EVERYTHING' tone is so so so prevalent.

Hate this

It's the -ish that does it innit.

yea they're not like that OH NO WHAT A PERSONAL DISASTER guy -- that's kind of cool if you can pull it off. they come off as a bit distant from stuff they're supposed to be liking. obv im talking about people talking about records or films or whatever -- like i talk about anything else. i blame laverne!

I think this is a logical extension of the "terrified of looking uncool" thing, so you can always fall behind the "nothing's taken that seriously" smokescreen. Lol culture indeed.

Miquita Oliver is worse than any of these people though.

Laverne's a renaissance woman compared to most television presenters.

yeah -- that's why it's disappointing.

it's partly the format of that show + what the beeb think people want.

She's funnier in real life.

that's why i still like her

She's like Gaunty in that respect.

her weirdly noncommittal 'be sarcastic-ish about EVERYTHING' tone is so so so prevalent.

-- banriquit, Tuesday, 1 April 2008 13:22 (14 minutes ago)

I guess it's true that (apart from anything else) she showed she had musical talent and creative spunk, compared to most of them who apparently don't.

But Banriquit is spot-on about her tone, and its general prevalence - he hits on a real cultural malaise here (and not, I trust, a gender-specific one).

Stevie T has also spoken insightfully, in the past, of this kind of tone / milieu and its historical emergence.

If those xfm people never really exist, are you sure Laverne can be their doyenne? ... maybe this is like being married to God (who doesn't exist).

blueski, in what sense do you know Laverne 'in real life'?

Laverne is as good a musician, TV host, and radio presenter as Suggs.

pinefox, i don't kiss and tell

oh but you know what i really really love hearing? what POLITICAL PARTIES these people align themselves with

Pretty sure Laverne is a libertarian.

Suggs was a better musician.

xxpost

Well, Suggs co-wrote a load of cracking pop records. comparison with him sounds like quite a commendation to me.

Omega Three Oilfox

... nope, don't get that one.

*here's* someone who knows how talented he is:
http://music.guardian.co.uk/pop/story/0,,2269827,00.html

LOL Dom, you're kicking uphill here.

Well, Suggs co-wrote a load of cracking pop records.

Did he? Lyrics you mean?

He wrote "Bette Davis Eyes" and "Bound 4 Da Reload"

I thought Mike Love wrote those

Nope, don't know what you're on about.

Madness made a load of good pop records anyway. In the old days of ILM that would have been pretty uncontroversial.

I have just found out who Miquita Oliver is.

--

Born on 25 April 1984 in Paddington, London, her mother is former Rip Rig & Panic singer and television presenter Andrea Oliver and her aunt is Neneh Cherry.

Miquita regularly hosts both Saturday and Sunday mornings T4 coverage and can be seen during the Easter, Summer and Christmas breaks hosting the T4 holiday morning coverage with Steve Jones. She is up-front, gutsy and without doubt wears her heart on her sleeve - don’t be fooled by her innocent appearance! She’s in-touch with her audience and can always be relied upon to tell it how it is.

Miquita was invited by a friend to screen test for a new Channel 4 music show whilst still at school. At just 16 she began co-hosting T4’s Popworld. Now an established face of Channel 4 she has over four years experience behind her.

--

16 !!

"A palsy sufferer, Ian Dury had more to offer on stage than his exemplary bravery."

O that brave spastic.

You're thinking of Mike Love.

Sounds more like Brian Wilson... now

"Among all the million musical moments on YouTube at the moment, Dury singing this amazing song is probably the single most exciting thing. I tune in half a dozen times a day, wondering what I have to do to make my words even half that good"

"approximate rhymes, which are very tricky to do. "I hear that train a-comin'/ It's rollin' round the bend/ And I ain't seen the sunshine/ Since I dunno when". "Bend" and "when" didn't really rhyme, but they did when he sang them, because that's the way he spoke."

very tricky.

So place your hard-earned peanuts in my tin
And thank the Creator you're not in the state I'm in
So long have I been languished on the shelf
I must give all proceedings to myself

I'm spasticus, I'm spasticus
I'm spasticus autisticus
I'm spasticus, I'm spasticus
I'm spasticus autisticus
I'm spasticus, I'm spasticus
I'm spasticus autisticus

The Guardian's coverage of Carla Bruni last week was particularly banal. Worst of it was a front page piece by Katherine Viner (I think) that compared her reading her speech about African women dying in childbirth with Jane Birkin in "Je T'Aime, Moi Non Plus". One of the most jaw droppingly dreadful pieces of journalism I've read in a long time.

I hear it's tricky to rock a rhyme that's right on time. Confirm/deny?

some wag should represent that lyric in graph form

http://cache.eb.com/eb/image?id=69140&rendTypeId=4

I hated all the Bruni crap, ie. OMG she knows how to sit like a prim lady, lol Swiss finishing schools. On a style point, also, the hugely branded Dior flats kind of meh.

It was as if one of those six-page G2 super-spreads lost its way and found itself right up front in Section 1. I half expected to see, in small capital letters near the bottom, "Advertisement paid for by the Republic of France".

wasn't just the guardian drinking the bruni kool-aid, though, was it? there's an identical desperation in editors' offices and conference rooms up and down the land. i know, i'm living and breathing it every fucking day.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n05/lanc01_.html

So we have arrived at a place where ‘the heart of modern journalism’ has become ‘the rapid repackaging of largely unchecked second-hand material, much of it designed to service the political or commercial interests of those who provide it’. In the old days, at this point in the story, it would be time to Name the Guilty Men. They would once have been the evil proprietors, top-hatted cigar-smoking manipulators of public opinion. I don’t agree with the conspiracy theory of the proprietor press, nor does Davies: he thinks that it’s sheer commercial pressure that is to blame. It’s the pressure on costs – to produce more, cheaper copy – that is the ultimate culprit for the state of the modern press.

Flat Earth News breaks down the specific ways in which pressure is exerted on the practice of journalism, on a daily basis. Stories need to be cheap, meaning ‘quick to cover’, ‘safe to publish’; they need to ‘select safe facts’ preferably from official sources; they need to ‘avoid the electric fence’, sources of guaranteed trouble such as the libel laws and the Israel lobby; to be based on ‘safe ideas’ and contradict no loved prevailing wisdoms; to avoid complicated or context-rich problems; and always to ‘give both sides of the story’ (‘balance means never having to say you’re sorry – because you haven’t said anything’). And conversely, there are active pressures to pursue stories that tell people what they want to hear, to give them lots of celebrity and TV-based coverage, and to subscribe to every moral panic. That’s the effect on the texture of journalism, the culture of the newsroom. Of course, the pressure on costs has other, simpler effects too. There is more space to fill – in the British papers, three times as much – but no equivalent expansion of the resources to do the work. Elsewhere, the pressure on resources is just as bad. In 1970, CBS had three full-time correspondents in Rome alone: by 2006, the entire US media, print and broadcast, was supporting only 141 foreign correspondents to cover the whole world.

As the pressures on journalism have increased, so the PR industry has come along with what appears to be a solution. Want news? We’ll give it to you. Britain now has 47,800 PR people to 45,000 journalists. It isn’t the case that PRs just beg for coverage for their clients: they’re much more cunning than that. Once one grows alert to the question, you can see PR influence almost everywhere in the press. The greatly missed Auberon Waugh used to say that behind any claim in any way interesting, striking or surprising in the news, there was either someone demanding more government money or a press release. That is truer than ever, only these days the press release will announce the result of a survey (a favourite PR tactic) or a ‘release’ statement from a phoney pressure group, such as one of the many set up to create uncertainty over the question of climate change. These pressure groups are known as ‘astroturf’ in the PR industry, because their grass-roots are fake, but that doesn’t stop their statements and surveys from getting on the news.

cf this much-loved thread

As far back as I can remember I always wanted to be a churnalist...

The above summation, laxalt's complaint, and many other comments in this thread can be summed up by my friend Mike's deathless retelling of an instruction he received from a higher-up when he was working as a video editor at a production company that was making a documentary about Ludacris. "It needs more lifestyle porn."

What PF has C&P here is annoying but true, especially in anything to do with arts and lifestyle areas. The latest PR trick is to try to see copy you've written before it goes to print, all in the name of 'fact-checking'. I usually explain very patiently that there is a sizable difference - something like 70p a word - between 'journalism' and 'advertorial' and that my agreement with my editor is to provide 'journalism'. We do advertorials too, but not on the cheap. Also that it's nothing personal, but fact-checking has to happen from a neutral, journalistic standpoint and when I have a pertinent question I will call. They really hate this, probably more than a journalist with 20 years of experience hates being micromanaged by some second-rate marketing flack.

I know you guys hate the fuck out of Neil Boorman, but one thing I did take from his book was hilarity at the butthurt Puma PR who didn't appreciate him blogging about preferring Adidas: 'whinge, whinge, I gave your old magazine one hell of an ad spend HOW DARE YOU I WILL RUIN YOU AND CUT YOU OFF'. Oh poor marketing baby, like you didn't get scooby snacks at work for networking a style mag editor. Go fuckin' fish. I wanted to find this woman, beat her up, and steal all her lunch money.

It’s the pressure on costs – to produce more, cheaper copy – that is the ultimate culprit for the state of the modern press

... exacerbated, of course, by the fact that nobody's buying papers any more, meaning display advertising is plummeting ... and who the fuck wants to take out a classified ad in this day and age?

newspapers doomed; journalism as we know it also (although in many ways that's no bad thing); headlines at 11 and indeed every fucking second afterwards, albeit wrong ones produced by work-experiencers working the backshift on their own.

I know you guys hate the fuck out of Neil Boorman

"The Sandman" was OK.

Psyche, comic book nerds are even worse than Shoreditchers.

Never heard of Neil Boorman, Suzy (but perhaps I can hope that this means I'm not part of the collective you refer to). And what are 'scooby snacks'?

You might not have heard of Neil Boorman (neither have I) but you must have heard of Scooby Doo?

NB used to be editor of Sleazenation magazine and wrote a book about giving up brands last year. It was OK but Dave Gorman book about unchained America is much better somehow.

Scooby snacks = praise/kudos.

neil boorman edited a fanzine, which carried advertising for big brands, called, not terribly ironically, 'shoreditch twat'.

he then edited a magazine called 'sleaze nation' (or it may by then have been just 'sleaze') that was largely a vehicle for ads for high-end schmutter.

he has now written a book about how brands are bad yeah? and we should all be individuals yeah?