Is the Guardian worse than it used to be?

how the FUCK does she keep getting writing work? She's utterly abysmal.

Yeahhhhhhh just what the Guardian needs, Allison Pearson 2.0.

Marcello, in full agreement with you re: food banks but TBF the Graun did liveblog the event itself and the Jack Monroe piece appeared the day before the debate - she was responsible for getting it in front of Parliament in the first place.

this is what annoys me about papers a bit, like, i don't condone stupid sexist images in the toilets of whatever restaurant, but it's like nobody cares about the writing, just the opinion.

That's what makes it so depressing, LG. Like the piece by Holly Baxter yesterday about Dev Hynes' house burning down...that was spiteful, published purely to get some kind of Twitter reaction AND terribly, terribly constructed. Who edits CiF? How do they recruit writers? Can anyone with a few links to email an editor have a go?

I swear to god The Guardian et al only publish Vagenda, Julie Bindel etc. as clickbait to horrify and outrage ~feministtwitter~ or whatever into sharing tweets, thinkpieces etc on the trollumnists. It clearly works or they wouldn't keep doing it.

But it's really disheartening to see ppl whose only exposure to this whole world is through CiF or whatev, think that these trollumnists are actually equivalent to UK Feminism as a thing.

I want to know the goss on how Vagenda did get book deal, column etc. when so many better and more cogent writers have not; suspect it's the same dreary stories of connections or whatev. :(

I want to know why Wednesday’s parliamentary ruckus about food banks was all over the Independent and Mirror yesterday and not mentioned at all in the Guardian (there was an incomplete parliamentary “sketch”).

Politics desk at Guardian dominated by ultra-Blairites who are more sympathetic to the government than to the opposition (and obviously, much more than to the kind of losers that might find themselves needing to use food banks).

Wow, that Holly Baxter piece is so bad it could have been published in the Mail and she wouldn’t have had to change a word.

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/dec/21/repossession-by-lionel-shriver

this is hilarious - i kept thinking it was a joke. it's like a 10-year-old's school essay mixed with desperately obvious contemporary chattering classes themes.

kinda mean of shriver to sell the guardian shit that nobody else would publish.

A working class woman rolls into view.

"I don't know how 'brave' I am when they're doing all the work," Helen said, trying to sound friendly to cover for her uncharitable assumptions.

"I mean taking that place on," the woman said. "Has quite the reputation round here, that house."

"Oh?" Helen's tone cooled. She'd hitherto nursed an aggressive lack of interest in her property's history, especially in whatever loser had lived here who was feckless enough to face foreclosure.

"Your last owner, Judith. Determined to go down with the ship, she was!"

"Except the ship," Helen nodded at her front door, "is still afloat."

The woman mistakenly imagined that the new owner was desperate to hear the story. "There's not many what realise it, but Judith weren't all that far from paying off the mortgage free and clear. But her husband had died a way back – something with the kidneys – and Ron'd brung in the bacon. Bus driver, if I recall rightly. Your bereavement payment is a one-off, your bereavement allowance last only a year, and Judith weren't old enough to draw a pension. So money got well tight. Kids were wasters. Which didn't keep her from slipping them two boys the odd tenner when she had it to spare. Only reason they ever called round, if you ask me. Judith was a generous soul. Just had her limits. She'd a long fuse on her, but she did have one fearsome temper once she was riled. All that dosh pitched to the bankers for donkey's, she weren't about to let 'em take that house off her."

"But apparently they did." With every new scrap of superfluous information, Helen's heart had steadily sunk. The last thing you wanted was a next-door neighbour who was a motor-mouth. This woman could make simply getting out the door for the smallest trip to the shops take 40 minutes. But Helen was under the misimpression that keeping her own comments to a minimum would discourage chat, when in truth terseness simply left her neighbour all the more conversational leeway to let fly.

"Not without a fight! Soon as Judith get that summons, she start hammering. A proper racket for me, you can imagine, and I come out to see she's banging up big plywood sheets over the windows, like you do for rough weather – but these boards is on the inside. They say she padlock the doors from the inside as well, top and bottom, front and back. She'd a great towering stack of food and drink in the cellar, the way them religious nutters ready for the end of the world. May not be much to look at to some – no offence intended – but to Judith it were her house, where she spend most of her marriage, where she raise her boys."

Bus driver, if I recall rightly.

the way them religious nutters ready for the end of the world.

Your bereavement payment is a one-off, your bereavement allowance last only a year, and Judith weren't old enough to draw a pension. So money got well tight.

It's seriously dire.

gosh, what an ear for the vernacular she got

Fiction in newspapers is always rub

let's not try to handwave this one away

It's seriously dire.

― Legitimate space tale (LocalGarda), Sunday, December 22, 2013 6:47 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

she is an awful writer, plotter and human surveyor.

can't help but imagine the woman looking like
http://img2-1.timeinc.net/ew/dynamic/imgs/050321/151820__mrs_l.jpg

Is Shriver's fiction all this bad? I've only ever read her Guardian columns (which hadn't really enthused me to try her books, but then AL Kennedy's Guardian columns were rubbish as well and I love her novels, probably true of numerous other novelists who write for newspapers?)

I've read only one book of hers (We Need To Talk About Kevin) and no, it was not like that.

We Need To Talk About Kevin is her only good book. There's something really tin-eared and flaccid about everything else she's written.

I assumed We Need To Talk About Kevin would be sort of like that, but I'm never going to read it anyway at this point.

That piece is like, if someone posted it here you'd feel embarrassed for them.

probably true of numerous other novelists who write for newspapers?

not a novelist but George Saunders' Guardian columns were staggeringly awful and his fiction is frequently magnificent.

Reminded me of the excerpts I read off Lanchester's Capital (in its own ilx thread). Incredibly flat prose, banal treatment of currently painful transformations that are taking place. You don't want to be offended, but a tiny part of you just is.

There's quite a few high-profile writers where I think their main qualities are a thick skin, impervious to criticism, and a staggering self-belief in their own abilities - which allows them to shamelessly peddle work that most of us would cringe in embarrassment over.

Everett True's Ten Australian Bands To Watch In 2014

you have got to be fucking kidding me

This is presumably part of the Australian edition of the website and I would say is fair game for that. However there seems to be no sensible demarcation between the different editions, with the result that readers are bombarded with trivial Australia coverage.

This had been annoying me for months, specifically that they seem incapable of repackaging stories for a non-Aus audience. So you click a headline about Sheffield and then realise you're reading about Tasmania. Or that time when the five most popular stories on the UK version of the app all started with the words Election 2013.

I mean, it is a bit better than it used to be but it's happened so often since they launched the Aus edition that any time I come across a story like that I start raging. I need to get a grip, really.

This is presumably part of the Australian edition of the website and I would say is fair game for that.

My major issue isn't that it's for the Australian edition of the website (being Australian and reading the Australian edition), the problem is that they got Everett fuckin' True to write it. The problem is that in 2014, someone is allowing Everett True to write *anything* about music because it is always shit. Sure enough, the bands selected and the article itself is shit. Actually, my problem is that every music writer for The Guardian is fucking awful.

However there seems to be no sensible demarcation between the different editions, with the result that readers are bombarded with trivial Australia coverage.

Coming from an AU edition perspective, I thought at the start that both UK and AU stories always get mixed up in a messy fashion (which was to be expected). Now you can usually get away with AU stories only (if that were my want, which isn't always that case) with only some EPL coverage and UK opinions4u seeping through.

it's a disgrace, i expect to be bombarded with trivial Britishes coverage

"You should care more about cats stuck in trees in Tamworth, Staffordshire and less about cats stuck in trees in Tamworth, New South Wales."

lol my kids hate Tamworth

But mate, it has The Big Golden Guitar and the Country Music Festiv...oh wait.

Tamworth, Staffs is not a bad little town but the only bit my kids have seen is the station, where we sometimes have to change trains. it's like something the East German government wd've rejected for being too soul-crushing and it's stuck out in the arse-end of an industrial estate/suburban desert

you can read my full article on post-war architecture in Tamworth and why no great indie bands have come from there in the Graun all next week

Cracking play area in the grounds of the castle iirc

haven't been there for 30+ years but it used to be, yeah

My abiding memory of Tamworth is of looking out of a window during a boring meeting and seeing a couple shagging in the gym across the street.

Didn't Julian Cope have some bizarre theory about how Tamworth was the mystical centre of England or something? Probably.

The slag heap on the cover of "Fried" is near Tamworth.

There's a whole chapter in Head On or Repossessed all about Tamworth being the mystical centre of England but I'm not about to dig it out to quote it...

http://www.theguardian.com/media/2014/jan/06/simon-hoggart-guardian-observer-journalist-dies-67

I think we can definitely say that the Guardian is now worse than it used to be

:(

ah man that's a bastard. think he was the paper's first quote-unquote personality writer that kept my attention when I read it as a pre-internet teen

yeah, him and another dude whose name i'm forgetting who did a heroically abstruse diary.. i want to say he was called "sotweed" but that's not quite it

Smallweed?

YES

RIP. like Mencap i go way back with Hoggart

i never liked the way that hoggart belittled john prescott, which bordered on bullying, but i suppose it was in a well-entrenched public school style of #bantz that i am simply allergic to in toto, but he was a very entertaining writer and it's was a service to be shown the stubborn, human fallibility of policitians