Be Excellent To Each Other

http://moreintelligentlife.com/content/ ... ?page=full

which model will survive longest?

The guardian is not a newspaper anymore. Instead, it is a collection of poorly written op- ed pieces on how America is bad, it is the best thing to be [insert minority sub culture here], people are terrible to the world and companies should give their cash away, a celebration of drug dealers making music (isn' t that great!), drug dealers are in prison ( but they never hurt a woman or child), the tories are bad, crime is because of the tories, israel bad, rioters misunderstood. I cannot wait for it to die and I bought it until 2010.

also, their open weekend lost them money.

I find the 'Independent' to be even more irritating. It reads like a 'Daily Mail' cavalcade of hate, but coming from the other side.

I'd hate for the Graun to close as we need a vibrant newspaper scene with papers from all sides of the political spectrum, but I became increasingly irritated by a certain air of smugness amongst its main columnists.

Its news coverage isn't as good as it should be: I still think the Torygraph is best for world news, followed by the Times. The Observer shamefully shoves the 'world news' onto a couple of pages, from what I remember.

The paper may be awful, but the software behind the guardian website is awesome.

<cough>

No good fishing for compliments here after you admitted culpability for the Gamestation atrocity.

It's awful. Doesn't work with IE in my office, and asks it to stop running scripts on every page, making it a horror to navigate.

I did? I don't think we did gamestation?

What version of ie are you using? We mainly did the cms and the underlying stuff, rather than the presentation layer though, for that you can blame the design agency.

Are any newspapers not-shit?

I'm worried about newspapers cutting costs because we plebs want to spend less. Internet papers are all very well, but if they can only survive without charging then it is pretty much the death of journalism. A paper has to have clout and highly trained journalists digging away patiently to be able to properly reveal bad things that matter. See Woodward and Bernstein. Hopefully this will be a wake up call to the Guardian that it can't afford the smugness and laurel-resting, but I dearly hope it doesn't go away.

Do people still buy newspapers? Is it just people that don't have computers or something?

I like newspapers as it gives something for my gippynigs and rabbit to shit on.

I got a good half way through that article before realising I'd already bloody read it, six months ago when it was first published!

Ach, every paper has the same downsides, just different flavours. And every paper will at some point have someone worth reading in them, I remember at the hight of The Mirror's Piersness, they'd have six pages of Pilger on the war in Iraq.

The Graun is full of aspirational lifestyle bollocks presently, but it's not irredeemable. Is Rusbridger going to run it forever?

The Guardian is on borrowed time anyway. The newspaper loses money hand over fist. They've had to sell off the radio stations they owed and now the entire thing is being propped up by Autotrader (which they own). The paper loses something like 100 grand a year. Not alot in the grand scheme of things but it soon adds up.

The entire point of the Guardian Media Group is to support the newspaper. But you can only sell off the crown jewels for so long before you have nothing left to sell.

I wish we had a proper, actual centre-left newspaper in the UK. The Graun and Indie basically aren't, they're just smug middle class liberal rags. Who both were pro LibDem at the last election, let us never forget.

I don't think it's fair to pick on them for supporting the Lib Dems. No-one in their wildest dreams could have guessed the extent of the evil.

As for the hundred grand, sell the monthly sub for a quarter of what it is now, on Newsstand and the rest. I took the trial Graun for a week, liked it, insofar as the paper is likeable presently, then went back to the website, where I use Safari's one awesome feature, the reader facility. . Sadly the website promotes the less appealing parts of the paper and I tend not to get as much of the stuff I valued, but for two pounds fifty a month they'd get money out of me where presently they get next to nothing.

The 'Lib Dems' are evil tag is just a lazy opinion formed from the reporting of pro-Labour and pro-Tory newspapers, and complete ignorance of what they were actually standing for and the point of political parties.

Sorry, had to get that off my chest. The amount of people who have been duped by the Tory spin machine is simply astounding.

Are we talking about newspapers going under?

So who here actually buys and reads a newspaper on a regular basis?

During the week, I'll flick through the Times if I am in the pub on my way home from work (they have a copy of it in there, but I won't buy it). At the weekend I might buy the grauniad as the TV guide is OK.

It is £100k a day it is losing.

Good grief.. That's a mind blowing amount!

I wonder if Times readers are mostly older and that it'll go the same way once their current readers die off.

I think that as people grow older their views shift further away from the left toward the right. As such, one is likely to like the Grauniad's stance on many things in their late teens when anything is possible, but through their mid to late twenties, their world experience puts aside these utopian ideals and their hopes and aspirations become more realsitic, so the grauniad becomes less relevant. it has always been really cheap at uni (20p or so) so that probably helps their circulation and maybe defines the articles.

I think "i" is quite a good paper when people leave it on the train for me to read.

I used to read the Times sometimes because they gave it away on the BOTE, that used some big words but was also okay. The business section was good.

The party that could have essentially shown some bottle and vetoed the Health Bill, but let that through, while claiming to have improved it? The Lib Dems are too often polishing turds and passing them off as gold. I don't doubt a Tory majority would have been even more toxic, but the Lib Dems aren't exactly coming across like a liberal, moderate party these days. There's doubtless spin (not least with student fees, say), but when yet another appalling piece of legislation sails through, backed by a party that wouldn't have touched it pre-election, you wonder about the level of said spin. I imagine 'confidence and supply' is looking like a good idea in hindsight—or having the balls to do what happens in other coalition governments and not always vote with the senior party.

As for newspapers, we can already see the trend (and the same for magazines). The shift towards opinion from proper investigative reporting is what happens when no-one will pay for anything. It's great having the Guardian for free, on the web. But when there's no money in advertising, what happens next? I think a lot of people see the web as some kind of beautiful and free utopia, but we're heading towards the point where journalists and journalism simply won't exist—and that would be a huge loss, regardless of your political colours.

Fuck me!

Gosh, well they are stuffed then. Auto Trader is the only thing propping the entire edifice up. No wonder they sold the radio division for a quick buck when it had been doing well.

Autotrader has always been propping the whole thing up, but they do seem to have had a slightly mad year and sold off some other bits. As you rightly said before, the whole group is there to support the paper - that's just the way they do it, much as they're shifting a bit towards trying to lose less from the paper - but selling off the family silver isn't going to help that. But so long as Autotrader supports the Guardian, it'll continue.

Not that I agree with the premise that the tone of the thing has shifted too badly, and I think it's still in some ways the only 'brave' paper. Torygraph has its moments, though only the MP expense scandal comes to mind, but if you're looking for journalistic success over the last year, surely you're looking at the Guardian? Waging war against Murdoch and winning is pretty cool, and I'd excuse them a bit of smuggery afterwards.

The sight of Polly Toynbee getting her P45 will be utterly delicious. Personally, I can't wait for that, can't stand her. Absurd woman.

Ah, so that's why Autotrader is full of spelling mistakes.

I used to get the Herald every other day then they filled it with fucking opinion pieces. Now I buy it at the weekends for the telly page

Mali - have you been following the "I hate trannies" Burchill-geddon? I've never understood why the Guardian/Observer give her money, the ghastly person.

They like hits/traffic. Ms. Trollface gets that for them.

That's the usual explanation in CiF land for a lot of what they're currently doing (blatantly anti male, anti Israel, pro-any crazy fuckers etc etc). Given that Rusbridger has said that it's a digital first publication I can well believe that they might do that.

Well, it works for the Heil. The Graun tends to be a bit more subtle about it - when I was talking to Andrew Orlowski (CLANG!) he told me it was an open competition between the Graun and the Telegraph for as many pro-Twitter articles they could write to get favourable access and hits.

Having said that it works for the Heil, depends on your definition of work. Despite effectively being a website that trolls the entirety of the Net, publishes soft porn and aims to be an absolute car crash, Mail Online gets fewer daily viewers than the average episode of Emmerdale.

Why the fuck were you talking to Orlowski? Especially without punching the fucker in the face.

He's a fucking twat that guy.

A deliberate twat at that, too.

Much of that traffic comes from Mrs Meaty

"I only read it for the celebrity stories and funny pictures of animals!"

x 1000

Are you basing you opinion on the physical paper? Because I agree, the website, which largely links to Comment Is Free troll fests, is depressing. The paper itself is great, although I only buy the Saturday one now.

Nobody came here for a lecture on communism.

And a ton of hits come from Mrs Malc74, for exactly the same reasons.

I tried to think of a way to put a stop to it, but blocking the page just presented a glaringly obvious "NETGEAR ROUTER HAS PREVENTED ACCESS TO THIS PAGE" message.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hosts_%28file%29

- point the mail site to 127.0.0.1. Will appear to always be down unless you're hosting a web page on your local machine.

It was the Twestival thing that I kicked off on the Guardian site. Can't remember the exact chain of events, but he was following it because of the potential for an article on El Reg and so he contacted me and we had a decent chat about the whole Twitter hype-train and that.

The only other thing I remember about the conversation is he had never heard the phrase "don't piss on my back and tell me it is raining".

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/20 ... NTCMP=SRCH



Not as cool as wanting to punch Stewert Lee in the face, mind, but still, good work!

So when did the Graun switch its vision from the future away from Second Life and on to Twitter?

Ugh. Don't remind me.


BBC Radio 1 Big Weekend Virtual Music Festival by louisetidus, on Flickr

Psst, Pliss...
Your blog is arsed (server error)
I reckon you've been haxxord good...