Is the Guardian worse than it used to be?

What is it with right wing liberals and tuition fees? These people are not people

They’ve had 25 years to rationalise pulling up the ladder.

I was once beyond offended to have the ‘it’s different because there were fewer students when I had free tuition’ argument from the barrister who was oposite number to Starmer on the McLibel trial, a guy who was sending his kids to private school and had gentleman’s club memberships (the guy knew my best friend).

I read today that the ransomware attack means it will be "weeks" before anyone can work in the Guardian office at King's Cross?? insane

i'd like to see a big story on all the ransomware events recently (or actually just all of them in toto: how many of them have there been? how many successful?)

but i feel like a lot of them are being kept out of the news the way kidnappers always say "don't call the cops"

A few freelancers I know are waiting for the payroll to be out of ransomeware jail.

Hinsliff is, as I have said before, a baffling figure, in that she is a nobody, famous for no reason, with no talent, liked by nobody, yet who has a prime opinion slot in a major media operation every week. And she usually uses it to say things that are bad, reactionary or offensive.

As I also tried to note before, other commentators are at least not nobodies. Jenkins, Jones, Monbiot, Williams, Harris - they can be good or bad but they are somehow recognisable, they have done something. Hinsliff seems never to have existed except as someone who writes Guardian opinion pieces that she doesn't have any credentials to write.

To be fair, her dad was in an episode of Z-Cars.

Extraordinary!

What have the likes of Jenkins, Jones, Monbiot, Williams, Harris done besides journalism? They aren't that different from Hinsliff.

i think jones and williams actually have the least varied careers: they both went straight into opinion journalism as far as i can tell

monbiot was an investigative reporter first, hinsliff was a political reporter and editor, jenkins was editor of the times and the evening standard nd chairecd the national trust, and harris was editor of er select and knows a lot abt britpop -- this is (or used to be) the normal trajectory, you prove yrself over on the facts side for a few years and then got a gig opining, often via a book that sold reasonably well

Looking at the wikis there is not a lot to distinguish any of them. Oxbridge then journalism of some kind or other, pretty much.

Only Monbiot has done extensive work as an activist. Jones did a stint working for McDonnell but it sounds like gap year work, which is really showing at the moment.

Hinsliff most closely mirrors Jenkins, in that they've done heavy work for the right wing pres

xpost

tbf knowing a lot about Britpop is a solid 10 minutes of endeavour

oh wait (xp) jones was also a trade union lobbyist, a parliamentary researcher for john mcdonnel and helped eric hobsbawm index a book (sorry this info was in a difft section)

tbf knowing a lot about Britpop is a solid 10 minutes of endeavour

― Wyverns and gulls rule my world (Noodle Vague), Tuesday, 10 January 2023 bookmarkflaglink

He believes Britpop was a shining moment for the UK's music industry, and possibly the end of an era, with (manufactured)[clarification needed] music now deliberately catering for the lowest common denominator. He presented a BBC Four documentary on the musical movement, The Britpop Story.

i guess this was proving himself over on the fiction side for a few years

it was a simpler time, a better time, a whiter time

good prep for going on racist safari in the suburban north

lol i mean i don't like harris's work and i don't like him but i think he's probably the most able of the bunch except for jenkins, who's old and been at the top of the system since i've been alive, so able in a difft way i guess

OJ is the best known socialist journalist or pundit in the country in the last 20 years.

Monbiot is the best known environmentalist in the country.

Jenkins, a knight of the realm I believe, has chaired the National Trust and done lots of such work, edited newspapers, written lots of books, often about architecture and so on.

Harris has a well-known background in pop journalism.

Williams (who rarely writes on the actual opinion pages now) is simply a Guardian staffer but has done it for over 25 years and is known to all Guardian readers, probably even liked by some.

The point for me is not that these are good people, but that they (less so Williams) are distinctive characters with bodies of work (OJ's 3 books for instance, SJ's and GM's several books); UK media personalities in a way, whom one could quite easily parody.

Almost no-one could identify a distinctive character to Hinsliff, or attribute a body of work to her. You couldn't even seriously write a parody of her, because there is nothing there to parody, except empty, reactionary so-called 'centrism'.

Even the fact that one has often seen the others on TV or heard them on radio is a criterion here. Has anyone ever seen or heard Hinsliff on TV or radio? (I hope not.)

she used to present The Big Breakfast iirc

Pop journalism isn't really a thing to be known for (sorry mark 🤣) unless you have avidly read the press or like indie pop. Most of the music papers he wrote for are dead.

Hinsliff has written a book and I can see her doing bollocks like chairing the National Trust. She is 30 years younger than Jenkins.

I'd back her. Hinsliff actually is fairly distinguished:

"After two years at the Grimsby Evening Telegraph from 1994 to 1996, Hinsliff joined the Daily Mail, where she was successively a news reporter and health reporter, before becoming a political reporter in 1997,[4] and finally chief political correspondent the following year. She joined The Observer in March 2000, initially in the same post, following Andy McSmith, who had joined The Daily Telegraph.[5] Hinsliff was the youngest political editor of a national newspaper when she was promoted in December 2004, this time succeeding Kamal Ahmed, who had been her immediate superior at The Observer since her original appointment.[4][5][6]"

no one can look me up on wikipedia and that's good not bad

no one can look me up on wikipedia and that's good not bad

There are two people on Wikipedia with my name, and neither of them is me. One is a former Church of England archdeacon and the other is a former US football player.

If anything she has held back because of motherly responsibilities:

"Although Hinsliff loved the job, she resigned in late September 2009 "to get a life", to move "out of London to write, think, do some projects I never had time for" and "to spend more time with her husband and son".[2][6]"

i think a better way of looking at it is that there's been a gradual shift since probably the 90s in the awarding of opinion columnist from the old school system towards a newer settlement

the earlier set-up -- which explains jenkins and hinsliff and maybe to a degree monbiot -- was up and through the industry itself: you proved yourself as a reporter or as an editor or as both, often at several kinds of titles, and opinion work was the next levelling up. proving yourself to some extent meant demonstrating reliaibility (with deadlines and wordlengths and such) but also as often as not biddability -- you could deliver copy on topic in the mode your editors wanted to see, so they could jigsaw it into the other opinions to provide a graduated perspective that matched the paper's identity. jenkins -- by virtue of tremendous seniority -- probably busts out of the top end of biddability now he's not actually working for murdoch (tho his opinions still mostly arrive from expectly the quarter his readers have come to pexct)

the second, as pinefox is suggesting, *is* somewhat more celebrity-based: it goes to ppl who've made their bones being "known" in some sense -- and (contra comrade alph) i do actually think its roots are partly in music and style journalism also, as a place where writing was expected to be a kind of swagger as much as a flourish of knowledge. partly it's arrived because in the 90s at least, the broadsheets were if not exacyly competing with such titles, at the very least conciously aiming to draw in readers from them. and secondly, punditry was greatly expanding, to fill out much larger acreage of print and a decline in the resources being pointed at genuine investigative reporting (which is extremely expensive and has been gradually collapsing in all titles)

so in conclusion hinsliff -- who i know very little about, as i don't really read any of this stuff lol -- perhaps owes her position to the older system not being completely vanished, not least bcz of the "biddability" dimension. she is pointed at topics and encouraged towards the take the guardian feels it needs at that moment… which is not the paper's *own* editorial position necessarily (which wd emerge directly from the editorials) but helps establish the bounds of the discussion itno which its editorials arrive

Yeah Hinsliff and Jenkins very much mirror one another. The latter started at Country Life, then TLS. It's just that one is that much older hence actually getting to edit a newspaper. A trajectory Hinsliff was v much on.

she used to present The Big Breakfast iirc

― Wyverns and gulls rule my world (Noodle Vague), Tuesday, 10 January 2023 bookmarkflaglink

This is an underrated post btw

Looking at this though:

"the second, as pinefox is suggesting, *is* somewhat more celebrity-based: it goes to ppl who've made their bones being "known" in some sense"

I wouldn't say it applies to Harris though? Isn't Harris very much in the same trajectory as Richard Williams who wrote for the music press then moved on to the national press?

I can see OJ as a bit of what pf is suggesting. He wrote a book that got traction, then manoeuvred that into a column.

And the Novara crowd follow onto that, for sure.

not sure that richard williams was ever a columnist or been called on to have published opinions about politics?

harris p much set his cap at crossing over into political commentary some time in the late 90s: it's the topic and the successful purpose of the britpop book (and he followed it up with a book on voting patterns), and i definitely think he bartered his cultural presence (he was also a regular on late review) into his pol-punditry slot

looking t it from the other direction, JH filled a slot that the broadsheets felt needed filling: of someone known for being on top of how pop worked being let loose to comment on politics, to hoover up a particular sector of the readership

Richard Williams was the Guardian's chief sports writer for a while, and iirc he did have a sports column from time to time, but yes, nothing on politics that I remember.

rw's also one of an interesting gang of music writers who graduated to writing abt motorsports: him, kerrang!! editor and inventor of heavy metal geoff barton, the nme's latterday editor conor mcnicholas and friend of the pod hazel southwell

Sorry no ofc just in the sense of another press (in this case the music press) being a feeder for the main newspaper press. But yes RW moved from music to sports xp

that's not at all so rare -- really quite of lot of editorial staffers from the music press ended up as commissioning editors or whatever in at the big papers, the skills are very transferrable

and of course the legendary bob houston worked at MM in the early 70s then founded the shortlived rock monthly cream (not the same as CREEM), then afterwards ran the miner, the journal for the NUM, at the same time as devising and creating started (the very successful) royalty magazine

bcz he was a communist who also liked the queen

I started buying Select in 1994 when I was 14 and spent two years completely obsessed, it was my gateway to much of the music I love, every page seemed so filled with originality, creativity and excitement for the new. Then in late 1996 it shifted into a music-themed lads mag, Oasis were on the cover every other issue, with Ocean Colour Scene, Paul Weller and The Verve on the others. Anything northern / macho / straight was good, anything arty or weird was worthy of nothing but contempt. It was JH that did this, and then he then appointed himself official historian of the scene he did his best to shit up. His brexitland safari pieces show the same arrogant, patronising, uncomprehending tone he had when writing about class in music in the 90s. Fuck him forever.

Isn't part of Harris's whole career project that elision/collision of the "values" (really more accurately the vibes) of Britpop and New Labour. A nexus he did as much as anybody to will into being?

i blame alan mcgee

where's doomie when you need him

McGee sees the business opportunity but Harris is the LOOK I'M NOT GONNA SAY GOEBBELS I'M TRYING TO NOT JUST BE SPEWING HATE BUT REALLY THE GOEBBELS of the project

He means it, maaaaan

The 4th Estate editor in place at the time had the thesis of the Britpop/New Lab book all ready to go from around 1996. I’m sure they spoke to loads of writers but I was the first to go in for a meeting about writing it, and then sent to meet the guy who was a popstar fixer for New Labour before the ‘97 election.

Much as I would’ve liked to do it, I had to pass because none of the groups were at a point where they could discuss themselves - they were all too busy getting hooked on or getting clean from various drugs, and I felt it was way too invasive to interrogate anyone about at that time. Nearly two years later, most of them were ready to talk to JH.

bcz he was a communist who also liked the queen

― mark s, Tuesday, 10 January 2023 bookmarkflaglink

This is an underrated post btw

Richard Williams was, as I recall, an excellent presence at Mark S's music conference. He said something funny about meeting Lou Reed. (I hope I am not imagining this.)

Every time I hear about Williams the message is positive: that he is humane and generous.

I liked his sports writing also.

was John the Baptist for Whispering Bob Harris

I think the closest I've seen him to losing his rag on twitter was in response to someone posting a schoolboy comment when he announced he had nearly finished writing his Dick Seaman book.

LOL hopefully he will follow it up with a book on Dick Hyman.

I've exchanged a few emails with Williams; I interviewed him for this piece because he was present at the gig documented on an archival live album. Nice guy. Knows a lot about jazz.