Is the Guardian worse than it used to be?

Viner commits the Guardian to follow five principles:

• Develop ideas that help to improve the world, not just critique it.

• Collaborate with readers and others to have greater impact.

• Diversify, to have richer reporting from a representative newsroom.

• Be meaningful in all our work.

• Report fairly on people as well as power and find things out. This underpins all of the above.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jan/15/five-principles-guardian-editor-readers-open-door

Somebody who can say that one of their 5 principles is 'Be meaningful in all our work' does not inspire confidence.

And this: 'Report fairly on people as well as power and find things out' - seems to roll 2 or 3 things together.

It doesn't give the impression that she is very good at thinking clearly.

have they said anything about how much they spent on the redesign?

• Develop ideas that help to improve the world, not just critique it.

be craven centrists at every opportunity

• Collaborate with readers and others to have greater impact.

source free content from any mug willing to offer it

• Diversify, to have richer reporting from a representative newsroom.

while at the same time cutting down the number of people we employ as often as we can

• Be meaningful in all our work.

not a great start since this is meaningless

• Report fairly on people as well as power and find things out. This underpins all of the above.

see point one

shdn't really go into detail but I have a friend who is probably not gonna bother freelance writing for the Graun any more because the pay is nowhere near enough to justify the amount of work put in

‘find things out’ is both cracking me up and making me angry

pretty sure "report fairly on people" means "John Harris continues to offer a platform to racist provincials"

reprot fairly on people unless they're jeremy corbyn

"report fairly on the Lib Dems no matter how funny they are"

"find things out" is a weird tell: it comes across as "we just remembered we're meant to be journalists!" but actually that's not really an area where people have been criticising them (think Dawn Foster): their weakness is in unclarity of ethos* and who they invite to be columnists.** The old school version was TELL THE STORY SOMEONE DOESN'T WANT TOLD (which is via some ghastly old rogue like derek jameson but it's still a handy thumbnail)

*I slightly fear "renewed strength and confidence" means "once more the boldly focused champions of the SDP and its inheritors
**There are FAR too many of these -- which is an industry-wide problem, partly bcz the hugely increased niche-ification and mannerist formalisation of sections sets up much more Space That Must Be Filled, partly bcz the back-end costs to punditry are WAAAAAY less than the back-end costs to investigative journalism

I quite like it when Mark S shows his roots in the inky HOT METAL days of the old Fleet Street.

I agree that 'find things out' is a funny, even embarrassing phrase. But insofar as it does mean something, it should be point 1, not an afterthought to point 5?

'Report the truth'; 'find out the facts'; whatever phrase is best - this should be their starting point.

'Develop ideas' is a bizarre candidate for the Guardian's primary role - if anything it belongs to a think tank or conceivably eg to the New Left Review. Surely newspapers have never thought of themselves as mainly 'developing ideas'. That the Guardian does, suggests 'Comment' is now seen as the heart of the paper. But as Mark says, this needn't be the case, as their actual reporting is still good.

but comment is free

the commentary is what makes it impossible to support or fund the guardian, the very idea of helping to perpetuate simon jenkins

About 13,300,000 results (0.99 seconds)

No results found for "tell the story someone doesn't want told".

journalism is dead

There I was thinking the retirement of rufus might signal the beginning of a vastly better era for the paper

I assume this is supposed to pull double-duty as a mission statement and staff wellbeing charter. Did they ever fix their problem with zero hour contracting?

the quote i had in mind is a little different: it's from this (very entetaining) essay in alex cockburn's corruptins of empire (sadly not all visible via googlebooks PSYCH! policy

jameson says something like "i don;t hold with all this high falutin stuff. i don't claim to be pure… i'm a newsapaperman, i tell stories" (which is obviously a bit different)

(the viner list is the very essenve of the kind of high falute he was having none of)

haha i'd sort of compressed jameson's cheerful directness with orwell's slightly fussier point:
"Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations"

^^^nick cohen quotes this now and then which may be why i directed myself to forget its provenance (not least bcz it long ago shaded into the "ethics of journalism in gaming")

Have you read Perry Anderson's elegy for Cockburn? It is called COUNTERPUNCHER and bizarrely like all PA's elegies, it says things like "A fine chef, he was irresistible to the opposite sex".

I always get George Orwell and Derek Jameson mixed up too!

they are the same imo

"do they mean us? they surely 1984"

I still get Derek Malcolm mixed up with Derek Jameson, even though the latter isn't too active these days.

yes i have! you pointed me to it i think: my perryman

http://www.azquotes.com/picture-quotes/quote-utopia-would-seem-to-offer-the-spectacle-of-one-of-those-rare-phenomena-whose-concept-fredric-jameson-66-4-0412.jpg

lol what a twerp he is

That quotation does not seem very sensible to me.

he means "utopia's only reality is imaginary" (given what i know, i feel there's a but coming, which never arrives bcz it took him six lines to say something i said in one

In utopia, the map is the territory.

That is well said! :O

now we are here in xanadu

In Soviet Russia territory maps you

Paul Mason column ditched.

Congrats to @guardian on redesign. Upside: masthead logo v sharp. Downside: no room for my weekly column anymore. It's the best newspaper in the U.K. And I hope to go on writing for it... (1/2)

— Paul Mason (@paulmasonnews) January 15, 2018

He was one of the most radical writers to have a regular slot in the mainstream media.

Perhaps the Guardian think Owen Jones is enough to attract JC supporters.

I assume the Cameron-speechwriter columnists continue.

Deborah Orr ditched too. Idk if they’re clearing out some of the higher paid writers.

well that sucks, mason is/was great

i look forward to welcoming their new, more affordable, craven centrist columnists

Giles Fraser is also going I think? my impression was that Orr and Fraser's columns were reliably awful, Mason sometimes wrote interesting stuff but also had some terrible positions - I feel like are a lot of better candidates for the role of token pro-Corbyn commentator if you're looking at it from that angle. I guess it depends who they're replaced with?

Deborah was talking up zero hour contracts as a good thing, then karma intervened....

Orr’s comment pieces were abysmal but I don’t think her proper journalism was considered that bad.

Mason turned into a bit of a joke figure on the left but he was, at least, a break from centrism.

In memorium:

@stoya come to Athens - the revolution is happening

— Paul Mason (@paulmasonnews) January 25, 2015

Deba re de dee deba re de dee
O Deborah
You dress like an art teacher
Your sunken face is like a galleon
Clothed with bad takes of the Spanish Main, O Deborah

Ni ni ni ni ni

delet

Once you @ a porn star on twitter, that's just who you are from then on. There isn't a way back.

I'm sure Deborah Orr wasn't always as awful as she became over the last five years or so. Mason is no great loss but the fact that Simon Jenkins is still there is inexplicable.

the only reason I can think of why Jenkins is still there = there is a contingent of older tory-leaning people who have nevertheless always bought the Guardian because they think it's better written than it's right wing competitors, if they get rid of Jenkins some of these people might start buying the Times instead? (esp because they are now both tabloids and the Times is 60p cheaper, and these readers are some of the last folks actually paying money to read the Guardian?)

slightly wondering if there's contractual -- or just practical* -- reasons not to have said goodbye to him yesterday, along with the old typeface and some of more the junior faces

*a redesign is often stepped (not least because you basically need two entire staffs to negotiate it): the major layout elements done week 1, say, other changes week 2,3 etc): but because of the change of format here this p much all has to go at once, up on day one

the crisis-management practicalities of firing a high-profile figure in the london media establishment -- with him able to secretly leak demoralising scuttlebutt etc, from the moment of his notice -- *could* be a reason to punt this for a week or a month (ppl might have judged orr is a basically a guardianista loyalist at some level, however grumpy she may feel over the next few weeks; jenkins is an ideological foe)

or they could think he'a good not bad

The analytics almost certainly play a big role as well and Jenkins' form of highly shareable trolling is a guaranteed source of traffic. Guessing Monbiot is still there as well.

(To clarify I don't think Monbiot is trolling but some of the more outrageous headlines attached to his pieces serve a similar function)

the change of the contrib guard is bound to come out in blibs and blobs a bit, isn't it, if only because the pundits aren't all run on the same day?

i slightly decoded viner's five points as a step away from clickbait praxis but not holding my breath: i actually like the new look but i think the attendant announcement has been super-feeble