Is the Guardian worse than it used to be?

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

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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

TBH this just results in me putting together a fantasy league team worth of columists I would drop.

weird that they led with rhik samadder on their first front page, isn't he just one their ex-guide clickbait writers?

'praxis' - A.H. Wilson

I don't see much reason to suppose that any columnists are dropped, until it turns out they're dropped?

Unlike others, I don't dislike Jenkins as a writer. In fact simply as a writer of prose he is far better than most of them. I agree with about 50% of what he says, while usually feeling threatened, angered or alarmed by other 50%. I don't think he is a simple 'right-winger'. More a 'classical liberal' or the like.

I once told Alba (of ilx) I thought SJ was a CAVALIER and was very glad that he agreed.

I went out to buy the new Guardian.

There was just one tattered copy left in Marks & Spencer.

No copies left at all in WH Smith.

A Guardian frenzy!

Then I found a deep pile remaining in Sainsbury's.

The paper looks substantial to me, ie: it will take me days to get through it.

Lol.

Do not like the new masthead, social media logos etc.

If only the Guardian read ilxor.com user LBI's opinion on this, this would be reversed in no time, I know I know (it's not that serious)

am i right in thinking they're using an FT-style off white background on the website to denote columnists? could they perhaps change the body text on those pages to the same off-white colour?

You're not wrong, by the looks of it.

the formatting of the new logo on twitter is abysmal but i like the new masthead font

New masthead typeface is horrible, I wasn’t much a gnat of the old one. Eff a serif.

So. I've looked at the website on a number of different devices now, and it definitely looks different on different screens. But isn't it a bit odd that Factual Reporting aka Truth is pristine white, Official Guardian Opinions are a pale pinky colour, and Comment Is Free is kind of... brown?

Did no one think through the visual semiotics of that?

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DTqA0HhWAAEXPRo?format=jpg

"Comment Is Free" has always been full of brown