Is the Guardian worse than it used to be?

the best local periodical in the uk:

https://scontent.fcxh3-1.fna.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/s960x960/116103036_4378721398867388_4584950628621073141_o.jpg

oh fucked the link up. was the cover of Glasgow magazine "the digger"

https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/9bzzg5/the-digger-glasgow-patrick-ferry-720

https://www.pressgazette.co.uk/guardian-saturday-section-staff-say-proposal-to-close-mags-arrogant-anachronistic-and-wrong/

The Saturday section editors were forced to go into the office during lockdown because they were told their supplements were “absolutely crucial”, they claimed. They said they were later told the Saturday edition was the least hit by the coronavirus circulation slump

This is grim.

I have to confess that, despite maintaining a relatively strict lock down, I decided early on that the Saturday Guardian was "an essential purchase" - mostly for Alys Fowler and Rachel Roddy, mind.

"They also criticised the plan to cut 180 jobs when chief executive Annette Thomas, who joined the company in March, is on a base salary of £630,000 plus benefits."

Pretty much what I'm seeing in the discourse around uni redundancies too. Executives saving themselves and their pay to oversee cuts anywhere else.

Bet local councils and all manner of industries are similar but staff not owning or having a proper share and the rights that come with it is communism.

Cheaper than a cup of cappuccino.

Is Martin Kettle suggesting what I think he’s suggesting? https://t.co/MqLjftC1F2 pic.twitter.com/OBQDwW94XE

— Elvis Buñuelo (@Mr_Considerate) July 24, 2020

Buying five cappuccinos when I get up tomorrow.

Sorry to disappoint but this is not a 'gotcha' moment:
- The searches were authorised & legitimately carried out. The information used in the internal report into the handling of antisemitism complaints came to light when searches were undertaken in response to EHRC requests 1/2 https://t.co/kuAjqAClcX

— Jennie Formby (@Jennieformby1) July 24, 2020

Might just plunge what remains of my overdraft into the NotTheFuckingGraun coffee company shares

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jul/26/my-brother-and-i-tried-to-break-into-a-botanical-garden-and-memories-of-my-father-rushed-back

Sod what you want, Tom. pic.twitter.com/QK6g8KoAwC

— Angry People in Local Newspapers (@angrypiln) July 28, 2020

OT yet v relevant after our discussion: my new favourite twitter account, Angry People in Local Newspapers

I would give The Guardian the cost of a coffee they’re always asking for if it commissioned someone who a) knows how exam grades have been calculated this year and b) knows how exam grades are calculated in normal years but instead we get:

Ok, I just had a call, recorded voice, very plummy, saying "a tax fraud case has been registered in your name and if you do not press 1 straightaway, you will be arrested shortly." This has to be a hoax, doesn't it?

— (((Zoe Williams))) (@zoesqwilliams) August 10, 2020

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/aug/10/exam-results-inequality-private-state-students

In all the handwringing, there is an acceptance of one inevitable choice – either Ofqual extrapolated from precedent, and kept grades level, or they took teachers’ predictions, and accepted perhaps a significant amount of grade inflation. I would have been far happier with the latter: grade inflation, like any inflation, erodes inequality by shaving away pre-existing advantage in a relatively painless way.

!!!!

Are you commenting on ZW's tweet?

Not really, just the practice of getting people who don't properly understand complex issues outside their area of expertise to spout forth like authorities because they have a weekly column to fill.

Mr Simon Jenkins are you listening

I know we all know this but seeing this on paper is just...an awful way to live.

Sarah Ditum’s piece on journalism is being greeted with much chin-stroking by columnists, but all it does is expose the truth that people literally are just scanning twitter and news lines and then diving into firing off takes they have no expertise in pic.twitter.com/R8GJC4VKN2

— Joseph / йосиф сташко🇺🇦 (@JosephStash) August 27, 2020

Thank you, The Observer, for further contributing to the idiot-inveigling aura of France's de facto Covid Conspiracy Theorist in Chief:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/aug/30/marseilles-maverick-covid-scientist-why-the-city-took-doctor-to-its-heart

Someone must have been asleep for this to be published.

The right's culture war is no longer a sideshow to our politics – it is our politics | Nesrine Malik https://t.co/NtRyFQEHmv

— The Guardian (@guardian) August 31, 2020

Good piece, yeah, albeit as depressing as you'd expect.

Do you?

The latest genre of lifestyle opinion article seems to be "people who haven't worked in an office in 30 years extolling the benefits of working in an office": pic.twitter.com/51eqvZpMFm

— Doctor Neutopia (@oceanclub) September 7, 2020

It's one sure sign you haven't been in an office in 30 years if you still think people get birthday cakes.

— Doctor Neutopia (@oceanclub) September 7, 2020

I mean this bit isn't true, the tyranny of office baking/obligatory baked goods is still going strong.

I've just read that Zoe Williams column and wow it's so phoned in you have to wonder what the point of writing it in the first place beyond "working from home is boring".

Cake detail aside I'm assuming this piece will not make space for the idea that the office debate isn't about what workers want.

It's paper thin even by Zoe Williams standards, she doesn't miss the office, she misses the idea of what the office was like in her 20s. Which makes it doubly irrelevant as 20-somethings are likely to be among the first back into the office for all the obvious reasons.

🐦[It’s one sure sign you haven’t been in an office in 30 years if you still think people get birthday cakes.
— Doctor Neutopia (@oceanclub) September 7, 2020🕸]🐦

I mean this bit isn't true, the tyranny of office baking/obligatory baked goods is still going strong.

The one time I was sufficiently in-office to merit cake, the cake arranging person was my friend. Also, it always falls to women to arrange office birthday stuff.

OK being required to bring your own cake to the office is a step too far.

"Everyone cooks something and then we have a team lunch" is another terrible idea that was increasingly widespread before the pandemic.

to be fair to her, i don't think that was even the worst thing she's published today...

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/sep/07/morrissey-germaine-greer-kate-hoey-sharing-flat-bbc-rightwing-comedy

i value my sides too much to read that no doubt hysterical piece of Nu Wodehouse

The absolute worst office for this did ‘bring cakes into the office the day before you go on holiday.’ Holiday sweets on your return were also expected.

In this same office, a list was circulated in December so you could write down what you wanted your secret santa to buy for you (value £15).

i would like three crisp fivers in a manila envelope pls santa

Yeah, there seems to be two different conversations there - I've never worked in (or until Suzy's post heard of) anywhere where you were bought cake on your birthday - you buy the cake (or more likely donuts (or sometimes a tableful of food)) for everyone else.

I mean I take my birthday and the following day off every year as a matter of principle but it would become a matter of necessity if I was working in one of those offices. That's some barbaric shit.

I also take my birthday off and we are also expected to bring back post-holiday sweeties (never pre, though, that’s savagery ffs).

Take as long as you want off, the cake debt will be waiting when you return.

much prefer it when no-one knows it is/ it's been your birthday until you dump a box of brownies on the table. one workplace (not in uk) used to have monthly birthday cake to celebrate everyone's birthday it was that month and everyone had to gather in the break room to sing happy birthday to the list of birthday-havers.

A friend once caused an office scandal by emailing everyone to say "Don't buy me tortoise stuff again for Secret Santa" (It hadn't been an entirely random gift - he did have a tortoise).

It remains unusually bad and nonsensical that ZW is writing about missing the office, on behalf of people not in the office, when she didn't work in the office anyway.

The Guardian can't be all bad if it cites beloved ILXors:

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/sep/07/beethoven-was-black-why-the-radical-idea-still-has-power-today

Citing mark s is good not bad, but it’s the exception that proves the rule.

This:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/sep/05/michel-faber-i-dont-read-fiction-any-more

Sad when it gets to his wife but I don't know how someone who seems to find getting through a book a chore ends up reviewing the stuff.

Of course you can pretty much get a handle on a book while you've read quite a lot of it, but this culture is so crazy around forming an opinion after you've finished something..

"You really don’t read fiction?
I used to review for the Guardian, partly to force myself to read a book from beginning to end: my usual practice from when I was 18 onwards was to just read maybe 15 pages [of a novel] to get a sense of how the author handled nuts-and-boltsy things like pace and description. Eventually I did think it was important, sometimes, to read the whole book, and [reviewing was] handy in that sense. Then when my wife, Eva, died… she was a great reader of fiction. She would read the books I was reviewing and we would talk about them. When that side of my life went, there didn’t seem any point any more."

An author who isn't a reader seems like a contradiction but then The Book of Strange New Things is one of the worst novels I've ever read so perhaps in his case it's not so surprising.

I on the other hand read a lot and can't write a decent sentence.

Yeah never mind actually writing the stuff. There was one twitter thread that was asking something like "do you have to be a reader to write?". I tried to forget it as soon as I saw it.

From what he is saying Faber got some mechanics out of it. That's perhaps a good angle to review something if you've assimilated an idea of correct technique and judged a book using that. Interested in how he landed the job in the first place.

ZW keeps going.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/sep/08/brexit-opposition-government-decline-politics-division

Isn't this the reverse of what she, and many other anti-Brexit people, said from 2016-2019?

In ZW's particular case I don't think that was from reactionary hatred of JC. But from many other people, who are also now keenly accepting Brexit, it was.

the likes of ZW and these Remainiac pricks got exactly what they wanted and it wasn't stopping brexit, it was thwarting the last chance we had for a centre-left govt for a generation. Because in the final analysis they are a bunch of m/c tory cunts no less. Sorry for the classism .. not all etc.

I mean Corbz/McD probably made enough bad decisions to doom "the project" themselves but the amount of energy these bullshit melts spent chipping away at them for years probably played its own part.

ZW was on radio 4 this morning being consulted as an expert on um i dunno work or life or something?

People being meaner to each other and more judgmental these days.

oh yes, she saw someone looking angry getting out of an uber.