Is the Guardian worse than it used to be?

I suspect there will still be a supplement (it's too big a driver of print sales for there not to be) but it'll be three sections amalgamated into one and probably on cheaper paper etc.

I don't really believe that its stance towards Corbyn (which was messy, conflicted, contradictory rather than uniformly hostile) is much of a factor here. They were quite happy to keep publishing the likes of Owen Jones and Aditya Chakrabortty alongside Rafael Behr and Gaby Hinsliff, there was plenty of pro-Corbyn opinion in there. More to the point they were hitting target on the voluntary contribution thing, which shows that enough people valued it as an entity. The Guardian is in trouble because the pandemic has accelerated longer term decline. (Fwiw I think the Suzanne Moore thing and the TERFy stuff more has damaged its brand a lot more, particularly among younger readers, which is why so many of its own staff put their name to a letter protesting it).

At the heart of this is a conflict between what people buy a paper for, especially a weekend paper (leisurely Saturday reading, crosswords, lifestyle, sport) and what flies online (polarising and shareable commentary, also sport probably). Very few people buy a paper for the opinion pieces - with one or two exceptions - but I bet you more people are reading, say, Jonathan Freedland now than did 15 years ago.

the model of clickbaiting with hate reads doesn't make a readership particularly endeared

This is definitely true though.

Also the number of times you'd find a copy of the Weekend or the Guide just sitting at your pub table from a previous occupant, I wonder how many sales they've lost because people aren't spending a leisurely Saturday afternoon in the pub (not to mention setting foot in shops at all if they can help it).

"Owen Jones and Aditya Chakrabortty alongside Rafael Behr and Gaby Hinsliff"

Maybe it feels balanced in the opinion pages (you can add more names in each column) but it did feel like the reporting itself was anti-Corbyn, and this is before you get to the Observer and it's shit stirring. The coverage of the issues raised by its left voices wasn't also dealt with v well (John Harris again).

(They also got rid of Dawn Forster too, after writing some stuff criticising Tom Watson.)

Whatever it feels like, the criticism on twitter is in regards to it's journalists asking for contributions more than anything. But they want it to be a Labour paper, which it absolutely never was.

steve bell is going

I think that's fundamentally right. It has never been a 'left-wing newspaper' and a lot of the complaints are from people expecting it to be one. At best, it's lower-case liberal with a handful of left-leaning voices mixed in, but resolutely hostile to socialism.

xp

Their coverage of Corbyn is absolutely at least as big a factor in their success in estranging segments of their readership (esp under 40) as their TERF shite

Guardian doesn't seem particularly interested in tomorrows readers, who they'll be and where they'll come from. Maybe thats a problem across the board but seems more so in this case

But the TERF stuff is a lot more damaging, particularly among the under 30s where support for trans rights is overwhelming, something like 70% at least. The proportion of young people who would specifically identify as pro-Corbyn, or let their media choices be driven by it, is a lot lower (although most voted Labour some of them did so more relucantly than in 2017, Brexit was an effective wedge issue between the two elections). And young people view the treatment of politicians differently to anything that affects the right of minority groups to exist in public places.

Young people are overwhelmingly Labour, especially in the Corbyn years?

Guardian doesn't seem particularly interested in tomorrows readers, who they'll be and where they'll come from. Maybe thats a problem across the board but seems more so in this case

― anvil, Friday, 17 July 2020 bookmarkflaglink

Well the Guardian is a lib paper but a lot of left leaning ppl read it. It definitely courts that audience in its opinion pages. But then it will alienate it, hence some of the reaction to the job cuts.

The Mail is only interested in one audience, by contrast. I doubt it has ever run a pro-trans rights piece ever.

suspect a lot of left leaning ppl only read it because it's the only game in town that's not paywalled and has half decent web design

Their coverage of Corbyn is absolutely at least as big a factor in their success in estranging segments of their readership (esp under 40) as their TERF shite

Only game in town, that's it.

I didn’t forget this 🙃

BREAKING. The Observer tactical voting guide for the top 50 seats that could decide the election, recommends Labour voters in Kensington vote ⁦@LibDems⁩ to stop the hard Brexit Tory. #SamForKen #GE2019 https://t.co/AuqUbzp6sD

— Sam Gyimah (@SamGyimah) December 8, 2019

📊🧐

Emma Dent Coad lost that seat by 150 votes. Gyimah was over 7k behind.


https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kensington_(UK_Parliament_constituency)

I'm not sure when I last read a guardian article. I've had an aversion for a while and I think it's been a good decade since I actually bought a paper but I was still occasionally getting linked to pieces (although less than to the FT or foreign papers) but even that seems to have dried up now. It's just v clearly written by and for a different class of people and the whole enterprise feels like a bitter echo from a v different age

Also I suppose what I'm saying is that Corbynism one way or another is in the past, the scars will take a long time to heal but the next generation of readers won't care about it, but if they keep publishing TERF articles under the guise of debate it's going to poison the relationship with those readers for years to come.

Will they survive long enough to get a next generation of readers? They've alienated a portion of the current one.

Also as things get worse they might need to give a strong voice to economically left material they might be uncomfortable with tbh.

the next generation of newspaper readers

and other fictions.

Up and coming blacksmiths

Time for The Guardian FM

That's the whole point, even this generation of young people don't buy physical newspapers but they still engage with the news and read articles (even if they hate them). The same will be true of the next generation as well in some way and the Guardian knows full well that they are never going to turn up at a newsagents and pay money for a physical paper but they might still read it online and presumably they want them to keep doing so.

It's doubtful whether that will ever be an economically viable proposition given the amount of content that newspapers put out on a daily basis but it does explain why they are going out of their way to keep older readers onside.

Even before the pandemic I would not have been shocked at Guardian print edition ending this year or next.

I'm pretty sure I haven't bought a physical newspaper in five years at the very least, maybe eight or nine, and I used to do habitually.

V interesting insights on hate reading model.

the hate-reading works so many, many ways

— Owen Hatherley (@owenhatherley) July 17, 2020

in here Left Twitter and Appalling Old Twats have a sort of mutual abusive relationship, and it's miserable (esp as it's only the Appalling Old Twats who really benefit from it)

— Owen Hatherley (@owenhatherley) July 17, 2020

otm don't give them the oxygen - delete your twitter and close these tabs

Amen to that.

I will never log off

Good points on how the model has moved on.

I think that actually the moment has passed. (A take! A veritable take, sir! I thought old England had lost the art!). Clickbait doesn't work anymore, no do hate-reads or even social shares. Advertising rates are simply too low, Facebook takes too much of the pot and agencies...

— Dan Davies (@dsquareddigest) July 17, 2020

I think Alphie and I must follow like 95% of the same people on Twitter because he’s always posting stuff I’m also reading and about to link. That’s an interesting thread, I had never heard of Nathan Tankus!

Who I follow breakdown:

95%: same as ilx poster gyac
4%: tankies
0.5%: ilx people(not gyac tho')
O.2%: ilx people that don't post anymore #onhere
0.3%: committed shitposters/book Twitter ppl

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D5CRW2CWAAAfnkt.jpg

long live the O.2%

but they still engage with the news and read articles

...is this true?

How young does Matt mean? There’s a huge amount of variation.

...is this true?

Yes -- but it's taking a while to dawn on the industry that the things <35 readers want are now fundamentally different to the things they're used to providing and that they'll have to change how they do what they do, not just the subjects they write about.

For example: in the early days of lockdown, across nearly all audience segments, the most sought-after thing people said they wanted was expert voices – they wanted to hear from the Faucis and Whittys of the world to know what they should do. For the mainstream 16-35 audience, however, the most sought-after thing was verification: they had already heard from a morass of voices, mostly online, and more often wanted to know if something they'd heard was actually true. Journalism as fact checking, not as conduit.

There's also the huge, bigger-than-generation-gap gulf over "objectivity". This is more complicated than "we hate the voice from nowhere stop both sides-ing" – it's about trust in the institutions and writers themselves.

It's more stark in the US than the UK, but younger audiences really don't trust the neutral these-are-the-facts framing at all. They assume everyone has a stance, so they are used to checking out the bona fides of everything they read, and working out from which angle a writer is coming before deciding how to appraise their work. This means house bylines or faux-objective writing make them feel as if the writer or publication is trying to conceal their true agenda. This is a problem for print media in particular, because the very approach that makes them seem trustworthy to readers in their 60s, undermines them with readers in their 20s.

The younger audiences also, to a slightly lesser degree, want to hear predominately from people who they think are broadly "like them". As they're predominately left, they'd expect to find those voices in the Guardian – and are then disappointed when they get there to find the wrong things being written about, in the wrong way. The BBC is in a similar fix.

(Interestingly, publications that use things like podcasts to humanise their writers have found that their writing is much more trusted as a result, even if it's still written in that older "balanced" style; this might be a way to square the circle. Laura K gets much more positive perceptions from Brexitcast listeners, for instance)

(The FT, btw, is a massive outlier and avoids these issues with younger audiences completely – it has the highest trust ratings of all the papers, and is trusted across virtually all other segments too. I suspect it's because people have a pretty clear idea where it's coming from, and because of the links with finance see it more as a factual information service like a newswire, even though it's really not)

That’s a really interesting post, thanks stet.

I feel almost guilty that I was only coming here to post Marina Hyde having a normal one last night:

What’s your real name, “Frank Owen’s Legendary Paintbrush”?? Man up and tell us, darlink https://t.co/EdK5spsh0h

— Marina Hyde (@MarinaHyde) July 17, 2020

stet, that's interesting but, um, do you have the data for that? :)
Have online publications even started to consistently link to original sources when writing about them? Most didn't a few years ago, I assume most still don't although it depends on the publication/stance.

For example, I hardly ever read the local news site because it's unreadable with ads and shite but they had a few figures about Covid cases in the area which I couldn't reconcile with govt published ones. I actually had to contact the writer of the piece to find out where they were from and why they were incorrect. They weren't at all transparent about what these numbers were, just presented as a list. Just a small example, but generally why I can only read articles about data (or scientific studies, or law, or comment on written text) as long as I can read the referenced text at source. NB I am slightly above age 35...

Do younger audiences really put the time in to check? Obviously great if they do, but what does this actually involve?

I don't think I can share it, but I'll ask because in theory my work could.

On the verification stuff, it's really clear <30s are much more active in checking out stories. Not in a rigourous way like you're describing, more "ok random WhatsApp fwd let's see if the BBC says the same thing". Marked difference compared to prevalent Boomer "I saw it on Facebook they wouldn't publish it if it wasn't true"

I'm guessing the FT avoids the trust issues because they are providing a lot of investor-type information and it has to be accurate reporting? Maybe a bit like the Economist you read around the good in-depth reporting but avoid the opinion (which was often incredibly boring reformist Bible).

I've always been as online as possible but this is interesting.

I can't be the only person on the left who ended up being So Very Online 2015-2019 in part because if I took a break from twitter and just read the news, I pretty quickly started getting actively misinformed on matters I cared about.

— Lafargue (@Lafargue) July 18, 2020

thanks stet, don't post anything you shouldn't, I don't know where you work and was interested in generally how you found this out!
also wonder what proportion of actual 16-35 yos the newspaper audience is that you describe.

by the vitally important voice of the left, marina hyde https://t.co/JnZVS0bSqt

— gart/barfield (@wurrance) July 18, 2020

a Marina Hyde joint from 2013, from before she was consistently hilarious and taking the conservative establishment down with her devastating wit every week and she wrote a horrible puff-piece on what a top bloke Farage is.

Booming post Stet.

I wouldn't quite put the FT and the Economist together here, the FT isn't quite Reuters but its reporting is as close to spin-free as you're going to get in a national newspaper. It also has a sustainable online revenue model and generally seems to be having a good crisis.

I don't if there are many readers who would rely on the Economist in the same way, I suppose its useful if you want to flaunt a surface knowledge of what's going on in the South China Sea and less so unless you want to be told that privatisation and deregulation is the only solution to, say, long waiting lists for allotments in England.

On trust - the Guardian is reasonably well trusted as far as UK news outlets go but that's not saying much. Trust is journalism in general is in the doldrums but trust in *individual journalists* can be very high.

will never understand why people pay money monthly just to read some psueds opinion on boring old politics brought to you by some shite broadsheet that died long ago. watching the news now i do wish i lived underground like were planned but i had to scrap