The Observer RIP (possibly)

Heavy losses cast doubt over future of The Observer

What am I going to read on Sunday now?

Hmm. Now why would News International want to indulge in such an extreme spin? In case anyone failed to notice, GMG did move to new, expensive offices last year.

Guardian's take on things I don't know anymore than you. Make of that what you will.

A lot of that reads like a lot of conjecture based on a fairly run-of-the-mill bet-hedging corporate statement. I suspect they're much more likely to start tarting it around to potential buyers.

who would buy it though? lebedev can't own every newspaper. but it might just be a strategy to get job cuts through by making people think there's a worse alternative.

the monthly mags have probably got to go. think they're supposed to make huge losses and the sport one is the only one that is any good. observer woman is shockingly bad and i can do without dr john briffa berating celebrities for eating pasta.

but what will become of Roasted?!!?!

I am staggered that we still haven't lost a single newspaper. I thought we'd be down at least one by Christmas 08.

Thanks, Roy Greenslade, you useless pillock: that was helpful.

Interesting one, this. But my gut feeling is there's no need to worry about the Observer for the forseeable future. "Extreme spin": I think Suzy's right about that, yes.

I'm still amazed at how hard Fox rode that whole Ahmadinejad christmas message on channel 4 as a HORRIBLE BAD THING, mentioning it was Channel 4 the whole time like any American would possibly give a shit. When I pointed out that C4 was a major competitor for programming w/Sky and that was probably at the bottom of it, I realized it was probably a good idea, going forward, to apply a bag of rock salt to anything News Int has to say about its competitors.

How much overlap is there between Guardian and Observer staff? Considering most publishers have been pushing through redundancies by merging daily and Sunday news operations. Jumping off from Joe's post, that would seem to be the most obvious way 'forward'. Can also see them slashing a few sections and/or farming them out to contract publishers a la Sunday Times Travel.

I can't think of many more spectacular ways to burn through money than publishing a big chunky multi-sectioned Sunday newspaper that doesn't make cash. Although buying a stake in EMAP is probably one of them.

the monthly mags have probably got to go. think they're supposed to make huge losses and the sport one is the only one that is any good.

y'know, i love the food mag, tbh, and it sprobably the only reason i'd be sad to see the obs go; that and mariella's problem page. i think kathryn flett has actually GONE INSANE, going by her recent columns.

but yeah. the times is hardly a rep source on this one. and i'd much rather see the sunday times go, having read the culture pullout for the first time in years in a cafe on sunday, and being unable to make it through the first para of any of the shitty, shitty features.

i think the sunday times is right on this occasion though: the ft has reported it too, and the guardian itself has a - slightly anodyne - version of it up. like i say, it may end just in cost-cutting but i don't think there's any reason to be sceptical that the scott trust has discussed closing the obs as a sunday paper and launching a weekly news mag. (as if the world needs another new statesman.)

otoh the guardian and the observer lose less money than the times and the sunday times do...

Joe, all the stories you list subsequent to the Times are meta-coverage prompted by the need to answer a competitor/cover the article-as-story.

I think all the magazines serve their market really well, even if the Observer Woman market is 'we're too stuck-up to pick up Grazia or Marie Claire'.

i don't think there's any reason to be sceptical that the scott trust has discussed closing the obs as a sunday paper

Er, no, I don't think anyone's denying that. But I don't think it's quite the catastrophic man-the-lifeboats situation that the Times is making out either. I mean, "Shit, should we close one of the papers, then?" is an item for discussion at pretty much every publishing board meeting now.

I would actually pay a cover price for a separate, spun-off Observer Sports Monthly, I think.

gf, the original sunday times story said the scott trust discussed closing the observer on july 6, but the plan was put on hold to work out alternatives which could mean slimming it down and making redundancies. the times follow-up said much the same thing. and this was described as "extreme spin" - if that's not scepticism, i don't know what is.

matt dc otm re osm.

anyway for this photo of max hastings alone, the observer and all its spin-off magazines must be destroyed:

http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Observer/Pix/pictures/2009/7/29/1248879604435

shit, that didn't work.

click here if you dare: http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/gallery/2009/aug/02/suit-style-icon?picture=350962107

yeah, that was pretty grotesque. was slightly alarmed that the food mag is on hiatus for august - do they do that every summer?

ken looks quite cute though

http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Observer/Pix/pictures/2009/8/1/1249120178263/Ken-Livingstone-in-fashio-001.jpg

If the figures that Times article reports are accurate, they're pretty horrendous. £36 million loss on revenues of £250 million. If this was any other business than the looking-glass world of the media, both papers would have gone by now. Something has got to give in the next couple of years, surely.

gf, the original sunday times story said the scott trust discussed closing the observer on july 6

Joe, it suggests that this discussion has been happening since 2004! I'm sorry, but "Guardian Media Group plots closure of Observer newspaper" is an absurdly OTT headline given that what's happening here -- much-needed discussion about the future -- is par for the course in every single newspaper boardroom.

(Anyway. All this reminds me of a story told by my pal on his first day at the Guardian, some 10 years ago now. He was being shown around the office and walked past a lift. "That takes you to the Observer offices," said one of his new colleagues. "Every week we get all our money, shovel it in there, and they burn it for us.")

click here if you dare: http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/gallery/2009/aug/02/suit-style-icon?picture=350962107

That singer from Hot Chip has really let himself go.

I defy anyone to look good in any of those outfits.

LOL John Torode dressed as Edwin Collins circa Orange Juice.

Anyway. All this reminds me of a story told by my pal on his first day at the Guardian, some 10 years ago now. He was being shown around the office and walked past a lift. "That takes you to the Observer offices," said one of his new colleagues. "Every week we get all our money, shovel it in there, and they burn it for us.")

― grimly fiendish, Monday, 3 August 2009 13:55 (22 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

pretty sure the autotrader staff say the same about the guardian.

Much of this is payback for all those stories about free sheets, surely...

OMG, never need to see Jeremy Vine in tight green trousers ever again.

I would actually pay a cover price for a separate, spun-off Observer Sports Monthly, I think.

― Matt DC, Monday, August 3, 2009 12:09 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

I would rather they spun it off to be honest. Rest of the paper has no interest for me, being awful and all.

Guardian internal memo says they're considering the closure.

The fact that they'd already dummied a weekly newsmag can't be good for the obs (and I do like that idea, I think that's the medium-term future for investigative reporting). I know the staff hate it, but I'd much rather that than closure.

Guardian internal memo says they're considering the closure

Exactly. TS: "considering" v "plotting". Fuck's sake, I will eat my green visor if some NI exec somewhere hasn't looked at the figures for the Times/Sunday Times and gone: "Jesus, can't we shut one of these?" The difference being that Uncle Rupe still really, really likes newspapers.

I know the staff hate it, but I'd much rather that than closure

Well, it's not either-or. There's always the option of them keeping the paper roughly as it is but making savage cuts to staffing ... you know, the sort of thing that's happening everywhere else :)

(Disclaimer: I know very little about the Observer staffing levels. But the hunch I have is that it's not exactly having to worry about bums on seats. Certainly, the more perceptive of my Guardian moles have used phrases such as "ridiculously overstaffed" in the past.)

(About the entire operation, that is.)

I don't see the huge gap between "considering" and "plotting" that you do. FFS, if the trust had liked the dummies back in June, the thing would already be shut. The mgmt are obviously wanting shot of it.

As for trimmed down: I think they're wise enough to realise that there's not a huge amount of point in the massive cuts/merger scenario. Their primary duty is to the Graun, and it would suffer under daily/weekly mergers as both sides always do, and as we've both seen. And big drops in staff will make it even less competitive than it already is, so what's the point of that - nostalgia?

Don't wanna be dissing 'em, cuz a certain editor is a good friend of my mum's, but during the two weeks i spent there I didn't notice a whole lot of active reporting going on.

Mostly they seemed to spend three of the week's days reading journals and booking dinners, followed by one day of making a few phone calls and another of running themselves ragged curning out articles. Not that two weeks is much of a sample.

no, that is how all weekly newspapers work ime.

ah yr making me nostalgic for sunday paper newsrooms

I don't see the huge gap between "considering" and "plotting" that you do

Er: the former is what they're doing. What everyone's doing (or, at least, everyone with any sense). The latter is some absurd notion that evil moustache-twiddling Scott Trusters are going "Mwahahahaha! Let's surprise everyone with our evil schemes!"

As the Sunday Times piece points out: they've been looking at this kind of thing for five years now! Sorry, that's hardly "plotting".

As for the rest of your argument: the problem here for both of us, I think, is that we don't actually read The Observer (the last time I saw a copy was on a plane, at least a year ago, and it was dire) so I don't think either of us is best placed to comment. Personally, I think a news magazine would be infinitely preferable ... although publishing on a Thursday seems insane. But I can't in all conscience sit here and go: "Yeh, this thing I never read, I'd rather it was something else," can I?

The bottom line, as always, is: could the existing Observer, with some kind of staff restructuring, be of benefit both as a title and a source of income? There's absolutely nothing else for them to consider. And sure, the staff will moan whatever happens, but if cutting X staff now saves Y jobs further down the line then it's got to be done, no?

fuck :( :( i like the observer much more than the weekend guardian. ill miss the magazines especially. the observer no longer has a tv guide but i still buy it, just cos the tone of a lot of the writing in the guide is irritating.

Eh? I do! I get it every weekend. Much prefer it to the alternatives.

The problem is it's losing £20m a year. We've already seen what cutting £1m of staff does. I'm not sure how big their wage bill is, but surely it can't be as big as £20m. I think there's quite a lot for them to consider. Ie they're supposedly now couching this in terms of "the Graun's at risk in three year's time if we don't do this", which suggests that the luxury of seeing if cuts work might be too expensive for them.

Save the maximum amount of cash asap seems to be the order of the day. If cutting one paper saves the Graun further down the line, then *that's* got to be done, I suspect is the thinking. xp

Eh? I do! I get it every weekend

Fucking hell, do you? Sorry: the impression I got from the way you were writing about it there was that -- like me -- you're a dispassionate observer. In that case: for fuck's sake, if you're a loyal reader and you're basically not that fussed about whether the paper stays or morphs into a mag, that strikes me as very telling indeed. (Then again, sample of one and all that.)

I actually can't quite comprehend the scale of the losses reported. I imagine their wage bill is vast; I'm guessing the various mags must cost an absolute fortune to run, too (and magazines have never been known for keeping their costs down, as I know all too well). But if this is the case:

which suggests that the luxury of seeing if cuts work might be too expensive for them

then my sympathies are kinda small, because it's not like this situation can have snuck up on them, is it? Once again: if they were discussing this back in 2004 and everything got put on hold because the editor got mumpy, what did they expect would happen five years further down the line?

If cutting one paper saves the Graun further down the line, then *that's* got to be done, I suspect is the thinking. xp

― stet, Monday, 3 August 2009 15:16 (6 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

yeah, because the scott trust has a duty to preserve the guardian in perpetuity. not so for the observer.

i quite like doing the observer crossword

Don't understand how they think they can make a weekly news magazine work when, as alluded to upthread, its closest model would be the New Statesmen which has never made a profit in its entire history. Maybe it'd be more mainstream and less political wonk, but still...

I think there's a biggish hole for a weekly newsmag, something like Time or Newsweek The closer model would be somewhere between The Week and The Economist, both of which make money.

its closest model would be the New Statesmen

xpost

Not necessarily: if they're daring with this, they could produce something that was effectively a condensed Sunday newspaper, ie with top-quality analysis but all the shit taken out. Problem is: I have a feeling a lot of people buy these things not for the intellectual weight but because they like drivelsome columnists etc.

In which case the worst-case scenario would be a magazine with no news or analysis content whatsoever but a tonne of half-arsed solipsism, gardening and lifestyle shite. Brr.

(Stet: stop posting here and reply to my e-mail, you gim.)

The Week

I was going to mention this earlier: I can't see the Nobserver going down that kind of route simply because it would involve accepting it wasn't the centre of the universe, and that other writers from other sources had more valuable things to say!

id be happy with something that combined their existing mag with in depth news analysis, and rotating music/womens/food etc content.

Problem is: I have a feeling a lot of people buy these things not for the intellectual weight but because they like drivelsome columnists etc.

i sort of feel that thinking's a little self-defeating, tho. reading a dreadful resto review in the times style section on sunday, which seemed mostly about how the writer's son has just completed tenure at an upscale boarding school, i wondered whether fewer people now read newspapers, etc, because so many of them are gunked up with such facile shit?

not that fussed
It's not so much that, just that if the choice was mag or closure, I'd take mag.

five years down the line
It's easier with hindsight though, isn't it? In 2004 there was still hope for the web turning out OK.

The Week
Yeah, I don't mean they'd copy the content -- just that there's a market for a weekly look at news.

Grimly - can't see that working - I had always assumed that people by and large bought Sunday broadsheets for the lifestyle/supplements and the actual news was something to wrap it all in. The Sunday Times was about the same weight as my desk last time I looked.

But yeah something like Newsweek would be a more workable model, perhaps.

newsweek sells like a million copies and has loads of reporters all over the world. we're supposed to be making the observer cheaper!

i wondered whether fewer people now read newspapers, etc, because so many of them are gunked up with such facile shit?

I just don't know. A lot of people I talk to about this sort of thing will begin by saying: "Oh, I like the so-and-so magazine" or whatever but, when pressed on what aspects they like, will then start to slag off individual writers for exactly that sort of thing.

My Great Plan, as outlined many years back, was that newspapers have got to stop trying to be all things to all people: if you've got a top-flight news team or shit-hot political analysts, concentrate on getting their stuff out there and forget all about your poxy lifestyle drivel. Similarly, if you've got a top-flight gardening writer ... well, you know what I mean. I'm being a bit tongue-in-cheek, but I really do think specialism is the way forward: trouble with that is it means, by necessity, far smaller audiences.

I had always assumed that people by and large bought Sunday broadsheets for the lifestyle/supplements and the actual news was something to wrap it all in

Heheh: same argument as Stevie, just the opposite side of the coin. I think the problem is that, with the market collapsing, no-one has a fucking clue what the remaining few readers want any more!

reading a dreadful resto review in the times style section on sunday, which seemed mostly about how the writer's son has just completed tenure at an upscale boarding school, i wondered whether fewer people now read newspapers, etc, because so many of them are gunked up with such facile shit?

I always wonder how the Sundays get away with this, basically aiming themselves at the tiny subsection of the population who are exactly like the posho writers themselves. My mum and dad getting, for the last 30+ years, weekly delivery of a review of a restaurant in W8 and a forthcoming exhibition they won't get within hundreds of miles of, makes no sense.

Plays well with advertisers though. Or at least it did, once upon a time.

Also, while it would be nice to believe that newspaper circulation is declining because of the Giles Corens and the Tanya Golds of this world, I'm pretty sure that's absolute bollocks.

they could bundle up The Guardian Guide, Guardian Weekend magazine and the revamped weekly "Observer magazine(s)" into a poly bag package and retail it for x price to go on sale on Fridays. but at what price?

The price of the soul of British journalism and everything we fought for during the war.

they need to pay fewer 17 year old sons of their writers to write blogs on their websites about their pending trips to india.

I remember seeing one of the old editors piss and brush his teeth at the urinal at the same time. That's the kind of cost-cutting multi-tasking the Obs could use more of.

it always strikes me that there's not actually a lot of value placed on the content with newspapers. I mean, once somebody is up and running as a writer, does the paper ever say "that piece was good", "that piece wasn't good". It doesn't seem that way. It just seems more like somebody writes a series of articles, an occasional wild one that provokes a few hundred comments, and then they're a personality or then they are farmed out to stories that follow a certain theme.

nobody is ever really accountable for their opinions or their skill. I know it's all subjective, but I just find it hard to see the fruits of any kind of evaluation process in bloom. it's prob a bigger issue since they started just flinging more and more content at people desperately.

I work in TV now and every day people criticise the show and say "what was wrong with this." I only wrote for newspapers a little but I wrote for plenty of other places, often it's like once something is done that's the end of it, even post-internet papers don't seem too bothered about what audiences think.

that's not my experience, at least. Most papers I know have a daily navel-gazing session where they look over the last issue and talk about what went right and what went wrong, and how things could have been improved.

That said, in recent years this is all tinged with amazement that anything came out at all, and it's all drowned in a sense of "lets just keep the wheels on for another day". People are accountable for their skills, but they're also a bum on a seat and T/S: shit homegrown spacefiller vs yet more wire pish.

that's not my experience, at least. Most papers I know have a daily navel-gazing session where they look over the last issue and talk about what went right and what went wrong, and how things could have been improved

Well, your former place of work doesn't any more. At least, not in the same way. But anyway, even when it did: how much of that really trickled down? When someone sat in conference and said: "God, Spoddy Spodburger's last few stories have been ace/shit", did his boss ever bother to pass that on? Usually not: the occasional: "Mm, the editor liked that," but very little more. How often did anyone who fucked up get sat down and have their fuck-up explained to them?

I think Ronan's right, and in some ways it feeds back into the eye-opening NYT piece I linked the other day: even when writers end up being described as having "a history of errors", nobody really deals with the root cause: they just hope that some poor moke like you or me or Ronan in his subbing days (I'm right that you've been part of our unhappy band, Ronan?) would fix it.

And when we're talking about columnists, or Sunday big-hitters, it's this bit that really resonates: nobody is ever really accountable for their opinions. That's exactly it. I could name four or five people we've worked with at various points, Stet, who were employed to write simply because of someone else's notion of what they represented -- or used to represent -- rather than because they actually had something worth hearing. (Of course, I could also name far more who fulfil a very specific remit with considerable aplomb.)

Now that I'm spending as much, if not more, of my time immersed in academic papers as I am in journalism, I'm increasingly amazed at just how gleefully unaccountable hackdom remains -- and how a small but significant minority of writers abuse those privileges terribly. And the slow erosion of the subeditor's art means moaning, miserable fuckers like me who at least managed to rein in some of the more absurd excesses are now little more than an irrelevance.

It helps, I suppose, when readers are allowed to beast in online straight under a piece, as with that Christopher Hart piece on Antichrist in the Mail (Him: "BAN THIS SICK FILTH! I've not actually seen it, but BAN IT ANYWAY"; Lots of readers: "You knob") but by then it's arguably a bit late, no? And, of course, readers' comments bring with them enough problems of their own ...

I think Ronan's largely right. But, sadly, Stet's practical point holds sway: when you're worrying about how the fuck you're going to survive another day, you don't tend to have time to look back.

It helps, I suppose, when readers are allowed to beast in online straight under a piece, as with that Christopher Hart piece on Antichrist in the Mail (Him: "BAN THIS SICK FILTH! I've not actually seen it, but BAN IT ANYWAY"; Lots of readers: "You knob") but by then it's arguably a bit late, no? And, of course, readers' comments bring with them enough problems of their own ...

i keep wondering if the (justified) furore that followed brian logan's pisspoor 'offensive comedy' piece in the G2 (where he suggested richard herring was suggesting that "maybe racists have a point"), and its even more pisspoor 'apology for said piece' piece (which was a masterpiece composed entirely of weasel words) might work to the disadvantage of his career, following hundreds of people who'd seen the show writing in to the paper, to say how woefully misrepresentative it was.

"Lots of readers"
"hundreds of people"

^^suspect that any time those numbers are attracted to the site is seen as a good thing, whether they're critical or not

Part of the problem must be that so much of the Observer covers the same ground as the Saturday Guardian.
I read about half of the Saturday Guardian, and that takes me until Tuesday most weeks. Why buy both?

the observer team's obviously been on a bit of a pr fightback. newsnight last night pointed out that the obs market share had held up better than the guardian and that the latter probably loses even more money.

private eye has an interesting piece as well. it points out how rusbridger and gmg chief exec carolyn mccall have been hoovering up pay rises, despite losing the company money. the justification for rusbridger is that he's become editor-in-chief of the obs as well - which gives him a great opportunity to close it down.

and it also reveals that one of the plans to turn the obs into a weekly current affairs mag would have it offered as a supplement to a new Sunday title, launched the same week the obs dies - called the sunday guardian! they must really hate each other.

There's long been bad feeling between Obs and Rusbridger.

In fact, ISTR this ed-in-chief power grab is why Alton went, but I'm only half-remembering this.

dunno about alton - he wasn't a very good editor either though i'm sure this didn't help.

but closing down the observer on cost-cutting grounds, then launching a sunday newspaper that will be just as expensive and hardly likely to make any more money... wasting millions like that would be next-level grudge-holding.

It probably wouldn't be as expensive if it's just the Guardian on a Sunday. And they need some kind of Sunday paper to offer advertisers a seven-day proposition.

^^^. Though the industry has built itself into a corner in the UK by creating an expectation of a bumper Saturday *and* Sunday paper, which nobody can afford to produce anymore.

I read about this in the daily mail

And they need some kind of Sunday paper to offer advertisers a seven-day proposition

Yeh, although very soon there won't be any advertisers left so that won't matter :)

Guardian gets revenge: http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/aug/05/news-corp-losses

it's worse than that story suggests for news international - the sunday times has started losing tons of money, when it used to prop up the times for years. and the news of the world's profits have shrunk to almost nothing, leaving the sun as the only money maker.

Their newspaper side is suddenly dire as fuck. They're going to try some serious web charging stuff in the coming year for sure.

pretty weird if it were outlasted by the independent. however bad it is, it'd leave a big gap in the market.

Still think it's much more likely they'll go the way of the Telegraph and make the Graun/Observer into a consolidated seven day news operation and lay a load of Observer journalists off.

actually, thinking about it, the observer SHOULD go under. though realize it isn't going to yet.

but this is some bollocks

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/oct/03/eu-britain-sovereignty-lisbon-treaty

by the chief leader writer. obviously the eu is a splendid thing that in no way undermines the principles of democratic accountability nor traduces britain's relatively (relative to the rest of europe) honorable record on liberty, but got dam that is some heavy irony to deploy in defence of one of the most nakedly corrupt "parliaments" in the west.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/nov/10/observer-sections-redesign

RIP observers sport, music and woman. tho the last two were shit obv. lots of staff to be "integrated". hope it's not just a staging post before closure.

Thought this might happen as Nic0la Jeal - exec ed of all those mags - just jumped ship to the Times. Perhaps she'll take Cocktail Girl with her.

Sounds like closure in all but name. Depending on the size of this "core" staff, anyway. But you don't "integrate" with something like the Graun staff, you just start working for the Graun.

£100,000-a-day losses though, blimey.

food monthly easily the best of the lot IMHO

you think? never really read it - OSM was one of the few supplements i'd go out of my way to read though.

ofm is definitely a traet. heard osm was great, but i'm just not all that interested in sport.

OSM was good but wayyyyyy too many expensive buy-ins; OFM is very good and has a strong identity, with mostly great contributors.

All the fucking celebrities in the OFM dragged it way down for me, also fuck Polly Vernon; OSM seemed worthy as a mag rather than a supplement more often than not. Only djmartian is permitted to pass judgement on the OMM

lol me using past tense

PV is very much encouraged/rewarded for writing in that style by the just-departed editor. Perhaps one of the long knives got her.

I think OSM fell off a bit towards the end but it was fantastic for several years after its launch. The music one was pretty ropey most of the time and the woman magazine has consistently been the worst thing in the Observer for several years.

Not surprised the food one is the one that survived - all the others kind of followed its lead after a while, especially design-wise. Also, more people eat than like sport, are women, or want to read about Neil Hannon being made to give an opinion on Tinchy Stryder. Stands to reason it would be the most attractive to advertisers as well.

The Observer is the only sunday paper I still buy so disappointed by the general shrinkage as well as the loss of OSM - the money and travel sections were always pretty good too and their integration into the main paper and magazine certainly won't allow for much coverage of either. But with losses like they're making I'd rather this than closure.

I spent about half an hour in the pub on Sunday ranting about quite how awful the Observer travel section is and this piece in particular so if they're really scrapping it then halle-fucking-lujah.

For some reason the Observer's design and lay-out really reminds me of The People, which is also shit.

xpost

ha! I'm probably rose-tinted rather than accurate, could downgrade the "pretty good" to "dismal" based on that link Matt. And actually, I only like the Cash section because of the readers' letters bit.

Yeah if that piece had been in the main section there'd have been a slightly awkward disconnect between it and the pictures of bombed out Beirut suburbs in the foreign section.

OMM was a bit shit but OSM was pretty good. Would have much rather them keep OSM than keep running that useless dickhead from Blur taking about cheese.

Sounds like closure in all but name. Depending on the size of this "core" staff, anyway

Eh? It ain't closed till it's closed. As long as it's got an identity that's definably separate from the Guardian -- even if that identity is little more than a masthead -- then the thing palpably exists even if it doesn't have a single "core"/dedicated member of staff. Ain't no room for romanticism in the newsroom these days: The Observer is bloody lucky to be there at all.

And the whole seven-day-operation thing has become a given for any daily/Sunday sister titles, so ... to be honest, this strikes me as a reasonably sensible compromise, although I don't read or like the Observer at all, so I'm looking at it totally dispassionately.

Not surprised the food one is the one that survived ... stands to reason it would be the most attractive to advertisers as well

Absolutely: I think that bit's the key. I'm guessing that, for a combination of Observer-core-readership and bang-per-buck, it's still a more immediate money-making platform.

The Observer's news pages have been so flimsy for so long that I think integrating them into a seven-day news operation would ultimately be a good thing. Even at its laziest the Guardian's news coverage knocks the Observer's into a cocked hat.

I'm increasingly coming round to the view that they won't actually close the Observer at all, the brand's too valuable.

Again, I think you're right: the whole Save-the-Observer protest nonsense was probably something of a wake-up call for GNM management -- even though I don't think the majority of people involved had a fucking clue what they were actually protesting about/for, other than: "We're English and middle class, and we hate change" :)

When your title is the oldest Sunday newspaper in the world it has tremendous symbolic and cultural capital - would be stupid to cash out.

ISTR the Save the Observer protest was a lot of past/present Obs/Guardian journalists packing out Friends House at the behest of the NUJ, who hate 'change' as euphemism for 'losing jobs' almost as much as they hate 'reform' as euphemism for 'budget cuts'. Get back to me when there's a consensus on which social class is most fucked off by that (I think it's a sixteen-zillion way tie).

ofm and the occasional bit of duncan castles' scandalous chelsea fanfic is all the obs has for me. saturday graun is barely any better but i'd be bereft if i couldn't laugh at what the magazine's style spread keeps doing to old people every week.

protip: get the ft weekend instead, the supplements are excellent.

at the behest of the NUJ, who hate 'change' as euphemism for 'losing jobs' almost as much as they hate 'reform' as euphemism for 'budget cuts'

Don't start me on the NUJ! If they didn't hate "change" fullstop, there wouldn't be the cataclysm of cuts that's happening now. Intransigent, backwards-looking, absurd, fantasy-land arseholes who don't give a fucking shit about the majority of their members ...

... and I say that, remember, as a fully paid up member and erstwhile striker and picket.

FT Weekend is V Good.

It's not that NUJ don't give a shit, it's that they have NO teeth.

But with losses like they're making I'd rather this than closure.

― Bill A, Wednesday, 11 November 2009 11:13 (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

worth remembering that the losses are for all the guardian group's national news operations not just the observer. so you've got to wonder why it's bearing the brunt of the cuts and the guardian and its website get to carry on burning money.

not sure what kind of change the nuj opposed that could have prevented these kind of cuts, though. what do you mean, grimly?

It's beautiful, Beirut, beautiful and ugly and pock-marked and damaged and glamorous and unstable and exciting and just a bit mentally unhinged.

It's not that NUJ don't give a shit, it's that they have NO teeth

No, it's that they don't give a shit and have no teeth. Actually, no, sorry: they give a shit about overpaid old-timers getting the best possible pay-off: how could I forget that? But in terms of trying to adapt to the demands of a dying industry; to manage the process of change and possibly, just possibly, maintain something that looks like professional journalism in the 21st century; and, most importantly, to support those of us who still work in newsrooms, they are useless.

The NUJ as it stands is a pointless combination of left-wing activism that's lost sight of the basic function of the union, and superannuated old men sucking their teeth and going: "Eeh, it all went wrong after Wapping." None of that is any fucking use to the poor bastard getting paid £11k a year to be a reporter-cum-snapper-cum-sub on a dying weekly local newspaper. Yes, there are some superb FoCs/MoCs/organisers out there -- as well as ordinary members -- who are genuinely trying to make a difference, but far too much of the NUJ's focus now is on looking backwards, not forwards -- which, when they still haven't even woken up to what's happened in the past two years, is absolutely disastrous.

Oh, and Scotland? Sorry, where's that again?

</rant>

*applauds*

not sure what kind of change the nuj opposed that could have prevented these kind of cuts, though. what do you mean, grimly?

"Work on the website? Our members? No, you'll need to hire extra staff for that. Websites ain't journalism."

"Flexible working for a 24-hour news operation? Our members? No, you'll need to can that idea completely. Websites ain't journalism."

"Reading the writing on the fucking wall for newspapers? Our members? No, you'll need to forget about that. Being able to read the writing on the fucking wall ain't journalism."

Repeat ad nauseam.

Basically, all I'm saying is that if the NUJ leadership hadn't been so absurdly stubborn a few years ago, we wouldn't all be quite as badly fucked. Fucked, yes ... but not on this level.

Anyway. I need to get on with some (non-journalistic) work; apologies for thread-derailment. (And Tracer: thank you.)

It's certainly good to get some perspective on this from someone in the industry - very interesting contributions there, grimly. Too easy to disconnect my sunday morning stagger to the papershop from the thousands of jobs involved in getting the print there.

As long as it's got an identity that's definably separate from the Guardian -- even if that identity is little more than a masthead -- then the thing palpably exists even if it doesn't have a single "core"/dedicated member of staff.

Palpably? Sounds much more to me like a zombie paper, literally existing in nothing more than name. Seven-day operation might have become a given, but is there any paper that's managed to stay the same quality or content-wise after a merger, let alone got better?

If they didn't hate "change" fullstop, there wouldn't be the cataclysm of cuts that's happening now.

EH? It's the NUJ's reactionary fighting that caused newspaper groups to hock themselves blind while pushing profit margins up to the unsustainable 20% area? That killed off the business model? Bollocks. The NUJ arguably made short-sighted company attempts to reorganise by sacking everyone a bit harder, but there's no way this cataclysm of cuts would have been prevented by their being less intransigent: industry income is down, massively and permanently, so jobs have to go.

xposts Those characterisations are a bit unfair. More like "Work on the website as well? When you've already laid off a third of the staff and our members are run ragged as it is? Try hiring more staff". "Flexible working for what you laughably want to call a 24-hour news operation? For our members that looks like it means making working conditions a whole lot worse and still not getting enough staff to do the job".

It's the union's job to fight for the T&Cs of its members; it's not up to it to dig companies out of the pit they've got themselves into it. Still: it could be working massively fucking harder at trying to find a way out of it, rather than pretending that you can just carry on business as usual at the bottom of a pit, tho. But this isn't an excuse for the companies to say "the union is fighting for better conditions for our staff! That's it, we need to sack everybody. Where's the corporate nuke?"

Sounds much more to me like a zombie paper

Umm: yes. But you could argue that's true of most of them now anyway :)

but there's no way this cataclysm of cuts would have been prevented by their being less intransigent: industry income is down, massively and permanently, so jobs have to go

As I said: yes, we'd be fucked, but nowhere near AS fucked. No, this isn't solely down to the NUJ -- but my god, they haven't made anything any easier.

If they hadn't been quite so focused on keeping superannuated hacks in cushy sinecures, not only would newsrooms have woken up to the fact that flexibility -- misappropriated word though it so often is -- was absolutely fucking vital some time ago; they might not have pissed off so many managers who looked at some of the old hacks and thought: "What exactly do we pay you for?" I'm not excusing the more rapacious approaches of some newspaper companies, but let's not forget: 1) we're all beholden to the shareholders (even the Guardian and Observer now), so what do we expect?; 2) journalism got off really fucking lightly for an awfully long time, and if the NUJ had been a little more forward-looking we might have been prepared for the inevitable. It was too much like "business as usual while the pit opened beneath us".

More like "Work on the website as well? When you've already laid off a third of the staff and our members are run ragged as it is? Try hiring more staff"

I should have made this clearer: I was talking about 10 years ago here, when -- compared to now -- we were all awash with staff. Fucking replete.

It's the union's job to fight for the T&Cs of its members

Yes, but it did that with a gleeful focus on the here-and-now, without an iota of consideration for what would happen in (say) a decade's time. Net result: thousands upon thousands of hacks getting screwed. The NUJ was always, from my perspective, about protecting the inflated salaries and pensions of the older hacks (NB: I can't complain about the salary I used to be on; I was one of the last to do well, I think), and to hell with the younger guys; there'd be lip-service, sure, but it took individual FoCs (such as one of ours) to actually say: OK, old-timers, it's time to give up your pay rises this year for the benefit of the young 'uns. Or individuals such as me to say: no, I can't accept that pay rise, give it to that new dude there.

Sure, you could argue that hacks 10 years ago (hello me) should have been able to read the writing on the wall too. But you don't, do you? You turn up to work and make the foolish, naive assumption that your union has the faintest idea of what's going on; of how to negotiate on your behalf; of how to ensure the best future. Gaaaaah :(

and our members are run ragged as it is

One other thing. I used to think I knew what "run ragged" meant. I didn't have a fucking CLUE :(

Too easy to disconnect my sunday morning stagger to the papershop from the thousands of jobs involved in getting the print there

Thanks, Bill: sorry, I'm aware this has now descended into two-former-colleagues-have-the-same-old-argument but if someone somewhere doesn't mind, that's probably cool.

Thousands of jobs: yes. But some of those jobs -- as is true of every industry -- are less vital than others, or are done by people who maybe aren't the best for the job. Trouble is, journalism has always had a tremendously inflated sense of its own importance (you could, if you so desired, dig up some old posts of mine to support that) and now finds itself going: "Er, shit" when it's way, way too late. Like Stet points out: almost all of what's happened can simply be traced to the bottom line. But if we -- hacks, NUJ members, whatever -- hadn't been so fucking smug and complacent for so long, we might have been able to salvage something a little less sorry-ass than what passes for the UK newspaper industry right now.

On which note: anyone else see George Monbiot yesterday? Depressingly OTM:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/nov/09/local-newspapers-democracy

The reason the Obs rather than the Graun bears the brunt of cuts is that the stated, legal purpose of the Scott Trust - the ultimate owner of both - is "to preserve in perpetuity the journalism of the Guardian". Not anyone else's journalism. Had the Graun not bought the Obs, it would have folded years ago, too - you may remember the Graun was the only buyer.

well, there were also negotiations to merge it with the sindy and retain the observer name.

but since the guardian wound up the scott trust and it's now owned by a ltd company - a change implemented to dodge inheritance tax of all things - they could have configured the new company to protect both the guardian and the observer to reflect its position as gnm's sunday paper, which obviously didn't exist in 1936. it's very telling that they didn't.

Joe, I don't think that's a fair interpretation. On the first point, Sindy/Obs thing would never in a million years have happened. On the second, the Scott Trust was reconfigured in October 2008, because the Trust was a fixed-term enterprise. But the reconfiguration was, naturally, designed to recapitulate the existing values. It's not owned by a limited company in any normal sense - none of the shareholders are able to extract any value from it. Scott Trust values are about protecting the Guardian, not any other business it happens to have picked up along the way. Otherwise you'd be hearing about Auto Trader, Emap and the like, not just the Obs. God knows there's plenty wrong with the Graun, but you can't blame it for trying to survive.

Otherwise you'd be hearing about Auto Trader, Emap and the like, not just the Obs

Not quite. For example, Guardian News and Media publishes the flagship titles, which are identified in that link as the Guardian and the Obs. The local papers/magazines/etc come under other divisions/companies, hence it's perfectly normal not to hear about them in the same breath as the two main papers.

So I think Joe has a very valid point here: when it suits the suits for the Observer to be a "flagship", it is ... but when it comes to the crunch, we know they'd happily sacrifice it. As I said above: big woop, that's what you get in the capitalist-consumer age. But I agree it's telling there was no protection offered for it at all when the trust was woun ... er, "reconfigured".

Hasn't the standing joke always been (in the old offices) to point at the lift that goes up to the Obs and say "that's where we put the money to be burnt"?

I'm not surprised they didn't add in Observer protection when they reconfigured -- it's going to be hard enough making sure the Graun survives, let alone something that bled cash even in the good ol' days.

But the point is that every single bit of Guardian Media Group business, including the Obs, is run to secure the future of the Guardian ... Under those terms, I just can't see how it's fair to have a go at the Graun for actually keeping the Obs alive, at incredible expense, for years longer than it would have survived otherwise - it has never made money for the Graun. No point saying that the Graun loses just as much money, cos that's why the Graun couldn't survive on its own and needs the support of the Trust's charter.

oh look, here's a video of gmg chief executive and scott trustee carolyn mccall saying that the remit of the trust was to protect the guardian and the observer in perpetuity.

http://blogs.pressgazette.co.uk/axegrinder/2009/09/07/video-carolyn-mccall-said-scott-trust-remit-was-to-protect-the-observer/

“The whole purpose of the Scott Trust is to ensure that The Guardian and The Observer exist in perpetuity - that they are totally independent, they can say what they want and behave the way they want without a proprietor. That is a fantastic thing and we think it gives us a great loyalty with not only with our readers but also with our staff.”

That's the only time it's ever been said then: go through Scott Trusst documentation and you will not find that. Also, given Rusbridger's public statements that, yes, closure of the Obs was considered, it seems to me that Carolyn McCall was glossing things up there ...

Also ... er, the Observer is still alive.

So what has the Graun done wrong?

go through Scott Trusst documentation and you will not find that.

ok, i did. and it doesn't mention the observer, but it does say: "the Guardian means (a) each of the Guardian newspaper, its website, any other internet or other digital activities, any successor news or media activities operating under the name of the Guardian or whose name includes Guardian and (b) such other businesses as may be approved by a resolution of the board with the consent in writing of at least 90 per cent in number of the directors of the company."

so they have the power to add the observer to this protection - as they did with the website which wouldn't have been included in 1936 - in recognition of its role as a de facto sunday guardian. but they've refused, despite the boss misleading observer staff by suggesting that they do consider it under the trust's protection. moreover they've considered starting a "sunday guardian" to replace it - which makes it clear that this is a corporate turf war and nothing to do with the real interests of the company.

if i was the editor, i'd slap "incorporating the sunday guardian" on the masthead next weekend and point them to that paragraph.

But the Observer is absolutely obsessive about NOT being the Sunday Guardian! That's one of the things the Obs staff and the NUJ were prepared to fight over. (Readership crossover between Obs and Graun is also astonishingly small.) The website, however, always had the Guardian name, and carried Guardian journalism, therefore falls under the rubric of the Guardian as defined by the trust. Rusbridger has spoken publicly about "the Guardian" for the purposes of Scott Trust protection not being just a newspaper, but any news provision whose name represents the Guardian - so Guardian Films and Guardian.co.uk as well.
Sunday Guardian was one of dozens of cost-cutting operations considered - and rejected - this summer.

Meanwhile, 100 jobs to go across GNM, and Graun's Technology section has had it
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/nov/11/guardian-news-and-media

What now for Mercedes Bunz?

Sadly, she'll probably stay -- albeit in a slightly different role -- while disaffected old hacks will take their voluntary-redundancy money and shuffle off to the pub. Result: a diminution of the product for everybody, staff and readers alike. And the union will claim a victory because there were no enforced job losses, thus missing the point entirely.

^ Disclaimer: I could be proved wrong about this, but I think that's a reasonable prediction.

And nobody mention that they've just added the chief executive of Virgin Media to the board, because he's done so well in futureproofing businesses for the multimedia age and getting people to pay for its services.

i'm sorry for implying all the cuts were falling on the observer now. i think what's clear is that the board have fucked up hugely. normally losses even of this size could be more or less absorbed by the profit-making parts of the group like autotrader. as the story puts it:

Carolyn McCall, the chief executive of GNM's parent company, Guardian Media Group, revealed that Trader Media Group has made £55m profit in the six months since 1 April and that Emap has made £40m in the same period.

buuuut, the private equity deal they did in 2007-8 means all those profits go into paying off private equity debt and they only get to cash in when they sell. as the annual report last year put it:

Both TMG and Emap have delivered significant operating profits and cash flows. However, due to the way in which the joint ventures are structured, these cash flows are used to service debt which is ring-fenced within these operations. Consequently, the focus of these investments for GMG is more on capital growth than cash generation. Our return from these businesses will be taken on exit.

so carolyn mccall and her band of geniuses chose the worst recession in 70 years to turn off the profits in the hope of payback in the long-term. she continues to collect her £650,000 compensation package, hundreds of others lose their jobs. amazing.

Yes, they bought the businesses on the Glazer-Man U model, which is what happens when you get into bed with private equity. So the businesses themselves have to use their profits to pay off the debts incurred in buying them. Which is ridiculous (and the Graun management should not have got in bed with private equity, given the paper's stance on those firms). But those deals were done before the collapse of the banks – GMG need not be blamed for failing to see an economic catastrophe that no one else saw coming either. They didn't choose the worst recession in 70 years to do so.

God knows I don't want to sound like a cheerleader for GMG board, who have made some terrible mistakes. But to return to my original point ... the Graun has managed, just, to stand by the Obs, a paper it saved in the first place. It would have closed without the Graun. So it seems unfair to attack the Graun for keeping the Obs alive, and for being willing to make sacrifices there in order to save the paper that is the point of the whole operation.

and the Graun management should not have got in bed with private equity, given the paper's stance on those firms

Yes. That, I think, is the reason all this rankles so much: there's a reek of hypocrisy about it, which might explain why people are being particularly quick/harsh to judge. You're right that nobody could really have seen the economic situation coming; it's just ironic/depressing (delete as applicable) that, of all people, it was GNM who really fucked up when they chose to embrace private equity.

(Er, GMG: sorry. Too many acronyms.)

(They're not even acronyms, are they? Just abbreviations. Although "GNNNNMMMM" and "GMMMMMMMG" are probably not unlike the noises being made by GMG executives right now ...)

Aw, ~I liked the Thursday technology section.

Graun could do better with advertising to foreigners, i.e sporting some web ads i might actually want to click. IT has been wall to wall ads for the Sarah Palin Biography in the last few months.

foreigners -> foreign residents

>Aw, ~I liked the Thursday technology section

Second that - there goes the reason I normally buy the Graun on Thursdays.

It felt a bit depressingly thin without any ads though.

I used to buy the Telegraph on Tuesday for its Connected section, the Times on Wednesday for its ... Network(?) section and the Guardian on Thursdays for Online.

What a loser.

shit buzz about the tech section...I wrote three front page articles for it!

Yes, they bought the businesses on the Glazer-Man U model, which is what happens when you get into bed with private equity. So the businesses themselves have to use their profits to pay off the debts incurred in buying them....But those deals were done before the collapse of the banks – GMG need not be blamed for failing to see an economic catastrophe that no one else saw coming either.

no, it's much worse than that. the guardian sold half of autotrader for £670m in march 2007 and told the independent's business section they would spend it "very wisely and carefully over a long period of time", maybe 50 or 60 years. instead they spent about £500m on a 50 per cent stake of emap's b-to-b publications in december of that year, three months after northern rock was bailed out by the government and a month after will hutton, observer columnist and scott trust board member, said this was the worst financial crisis he had seen for 30 years.

if they had heeded the warnings before the emap purchase, they would have a massive pile of cash and £55m a year profit from their half of autotrader to offset the losses of the guardian and observer. no need for cuts then.

but even if the emap deal was badly timed, at least they didn't have any debt: one sale easily paid for the other purchase, right? which is why it isn't like the glazer model. gmg could pay for its stake in emap out of the autotrader cash easily.

but last year's annual report makes it clear that they don't even get to keep the profits from the half of autotrader and emap that they own outright, without any debt. instead, their share of the money is used to pay private equity firm apax's debts and both companies will share the spoils later. the guardian doesn't see any return until and unless autotrader and emap are sold at a profit.

it's not just that this is a risky thing to do in a recession - which they should have been aware of by the time of the emap purchase - but it's always going to be risky to swap reliable revenue (autotrader) for a completely speculative capital gain, when the aspect of the business that you are supposed to protect - the guardian (and i'd argue the observer, but w/e) - is known to lose money every year.

God knows I don't want to sound like a cheerleader for GMG board

i'm sure the board didn't want to waste a massive amount of money and throw its papers into crisis, but they managed it all the same.

Haven't read the Observer recently but if yesterday's copy was anything to go by it's no wonder no=one reads it. Difficult to pick out a low-point but possibly Alex Blur on being thin?

In fairness, his column in the OFM has *always* been absolute garbage - at least he's not going on and on and on about making fucking cheese any more.

I used to feel buyer's remorse when I actually bought the thing, now I feel it when I steal my office's copy on a Monday.

alex james wrote a great piece on drinking once in about 2001/2002.

Yeah, really the Alex James piece was like the icing on the cake (a big fat buttery cake with cream and chocolate spread all over it). The whole paper seemed really..erm...thin on content and just, well, dull. I find all Sunday papers disappointing these days.

sunday papers have always been pretty shit though haven't they? nothing happens on saturday.

But they have a week to come up with something, anything, worth reading and they seem incapable of doing even that these days. Sunday papers priority isn't, and shouldn't be, to provide us with actual news.

xp I dunno, I used to look forward to sitting around with them scattered around the place, but the Telegraph has really gone off too. Last week I bought the bloody Times!

Yours sincerely,

Col Blimp (retired)

Alex james provided us with facts about fat people never getting old and news about him taking up running. Seriously, how much does he get paid?

Sunday papers priority isn't, and shouldn't be, to provide us with actual news.

well, quite - hence why i have never cottoned to them

> The whole paper seemed really..erm...thin on content

and some of that (graffiti on the tory campaign posters) was a repeat of friday's guardian

saturday, sorry

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/jan/30/david-cameron-graffiti

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jan/31/barbara-ellen-teenagers-jd-salinger

there's nothing sexy or saleable about alienated parents

orly? Hasn't Tony Parsons written this book?

If not, I'm on it.

My impression is that, relative to dailies and in the UK at least, Sunday papers have traditional had more of a mandate for lengthy investigative journalism.

They're all total dogshit though obviously.

Sunday papers have traditional had more of a mandate for lengthy investigative journalism. sitting around on their bollocks til Friday and then pissing out a story they've ripped off some science journal from six months ago.

The Sunday Times used to do Insight didn't it? I thought I remembered some of the front pages in fact, but I see, looking it up, that most of the big scoops would have been done before I'd reached the age of four, so that's probably not the case, since I can barely remember five years ago.

i think of sunday papers as the place for lengthy cafe interviews with the casting director who decided to use robert deniro for some movie that's coming out this week

Watch the television ad promoting the redesign, featuring The Thick of It actor Justin Edwards and sending up the shallowness of 24-hour news culture.

Shouldn't they have got Charlie Brooker to make that?

Anyway, any decent freebies?

So what's the deal with this new Observer?

http://deckchairs.net/images/deck_idea5.gif

It actually looks pretty good fwiw - one big in-depth story per page gives it a feeling of weight and the arts/review section has a nice feel to it. There's a good selection of heavyweight stories - as you'd expect for a relaunch.

But yes, what Noodle said basically. And the Sunday papers have always filled me with boredom anyway.

i think i prefer there only being 2 big sections (plus sport (usually recycled without reading) + magazine (no 'roasted')). the actual paper is a higher grade than usual too. crossword is still the same. same price too.

the magazine was terrible, i mean sunday supplements all are but it was so thin you could see that they've got no money to spend.

Yeah, main paper actually seemed better as a result of this - Review much improved.

I agree, Joe, the magazine felt pretty underpowered, I'm not going to do an a-to-b comparison with the old version but some pages and coverage have definitely gone. I did whoop with delight when K@thryn Fl3tt revealed it was her final column last week.

It's a small detail, but the magazine columnist photos have now been put through some kind of "cartoon you" filter and are very irritating to look at.

I did whoop with delight when K@thryn Fl3tt revealed it was her final column last week.

huzzah. I did enjoy hearing her on the radio the other day. Apparently she does not understand percentages.

Really liked the new review; much better design as well. Mag awful.

I mean, the mag was always awful, but it was comfortable awful, like old jeans.

otm - it seems odd that it's so bad, esp. since (imo) the Graun saturday magazine is much better than it used to be, although this might just be because T1m D0wling consistently brings the morning lols as I enjoy a late breakfast and ruminate on which household chores I can put off for another weekend.

note to mods -- the suggest ban was for this portion of the post: "T1m D0wling consistently brings the morning lols"

dude tim is awesome. i used to hate his stuff but then fell in to his groove, and he now never fails to bring L*O*L*Z

really liked the new obs, anyway, even the mag (though i may just be heady from joy of no more flett nuttiness, her column has been unreadable for a good coupla years)

I hope they went the whole hog and got rid of Barbara Ellen too.

was there a freebie with today's observer?

ownership

Mulholland Drive dvd.

cheers, that clears up a conversation i eavesdropped on today.