Farewell then, Observer Woman

[policywonk]

You were unbelievably shit
And we are glad that you are
dead

EJ Wonk, 38 (IQ points)

oh good. ofm is a bit shit too.

now, what has happened to the telly guides? i used to have about 10 and now i have to buy the guardian on saturday.

Off you fuck.

I quite liked it! (Am I damning it with faint praise?)

Huzzah ! It was utterly appalling

Just as I was starting to warm to it. And I like the Music one - I like reading the up their own arses/I'm a serious Muso letters.

I really liked OWM - not the handbags and lipsticks but thought it had great interviews and interesting features; Louise French, Rachel Cooke, Elizabeth Day and, yes, even Polly Vernon are excellent writers (well, PV when she's not writing about herself). I will have one less reason to buy the Observer from now on - I think this is commercial suicide by the bean counters.

fishie, aitch (I think) explained about the telly guides a while back - the papers have had to cut back on all the teenagers who used to write all the programme reviews (and the printing costs as well I suppose)

At least, with the Guardian Guide, you get Charlie Brooker.

And World of Lather.

used to be that i wished for two saturday papers and no sundays. now i just wish i didn't want to read a paper.

Acksherly, the slimmed-down Observer described in the link below sounds much more attractive to me than the half-ton behemoth it is at the moment.

What I really want at the weekend is Just. News. Would happily do without all the other stuff.

That's when you know you're getting old, wonk- when you want to just stick the Weekend Guardian straight into the recycling and get stuck into the Proper paper whilst eating your porridge of a Saturday

(and maybe read the review bit on the toilet, as a bit of Light Relief)

[stern]

OW. Great idea, in theory. When it was first launched, I thought I'd be at the newsagent's at the crack of dawn once a month to snap it up. How wrong I was. Goodbye, OW - though I've long mourned for what I hoped you would be, I shall not mourn for your actual demise.

True, Citizen (well, that and the fact that outlying parts of my body are shrivelling up and dropping off)

Also true MMH that OW could have been brilliant. So many fantastic women journalists out there, so many interesting subjects.

Observer Woman had a few interesting bits with lots and lots of stereotypically feminine guff in between. I always picked it up first, and always laid it down in disappointment 5 minutes later!!

Not sad to see it go, especially if a re-vamp will help the Observer to survive.

I wasn't bothered about it. It was stereotypical. Why single out the female sex for a special magazine? My partner read it to try to get some insight into the female psyche. In vain.

Women's Hour on Radio 4 annoys me as well - why no men's hour? Perhaps they should have a men's hour on alternate days.

It was rubbish. But I don't exactly know why. Even the good writers couldn't save it. Maybe that's the key - that it was too much writing and not enough pictures of handbags/A-list celebs/cellulite etc

hurrah.
Glad they've kept Food.

Oh this is a cozy corner of MN where I feel I fit in.
I am unfeasibly cheered that OFW is being ditched (sorry if people are out of work though) because it was utterly appalling, as many threads passim. have agreed.

It is sad that the Observer couldn't have got some of its excellent journalists (ie not columnists, sorry chaps) to write about genuine women-centred issues; then I would have bought multiple copies to give to my friends, despite the focus on interior decor and random people's life stories that seem to have taken over other bits of the paper.

The Observer must be pretty cheered by the thought of a Cameron govt, it'll give them their teeth back, with a bit of luck. Though if St Nige goes before the general election , there might not be time to recover. Most people I know who still buy it only do so for OFM and the gardening page.

'polly verno a good writer when she is not writing about herself?
how do you KNOW?'

LOL TMMJ.

Something I have been wondering about recently is when we move to the brave new world of paid-for content online who exactly will pay to read lifestyle columnists, (including 'mummy columns' eg that one in Times Slummy Mummy).

Even though I will click on some of these types of items in the Times (or whatever) at the moment, if I had to pay I wouldn't. I'd only pay for hard news or perhaps some specialist article on a subject of personal interest (which could include fashion).

If everyone was like me what happens to all that content? Does it disappear? Or do the outlets give it away free to readers who say they match the right demographic? For example I buy a package of hard news plus the fashion page and they also say 'have this article by Polly Vernon free'?

Or do all the journos currently writing lifestyle type columns migrate to doing pieces for sites like MN as a way of providing some extra content ...

Just cancelled the Observer, actually. I've been getting more and more riled about its London-centricity. I mean, it's not the flippin' Evening Standard!

I know all the meedja assumes that we all live in the capital, but the Observer was continually making me feel even more of the suburban frump that I am by not being intimately familiar with every Hoxton haunt.

If occasionally there is a nod to the provinces, it comes in the form of a letter from someone who is living in an ironic manner in Wigan, rather than someone in a 3-bedroom estate house in Basingstoke or Milton Keynes.

'living in an ironic manner in Wigan'

Actually, according to the recent document us Londoners have been issued with ('Straw-chewers and How to Avoid Them'), it's OK to live in Wigan (ironically or otherwise) because lots of Londoners pretend to have got really off their tits in Wigan Casino at some point in the mid-80s. That's probably why the letters are getting printed.

Aw, be fair Fircone, Jay Rayner did do a review of a restaurant in Leeds last week. (I noticed it particularly because it is so unusual.)