The Guardian job cuts

[MummBraTheEverLeaking]

twitter.com/ben_bt/status/1283351434717782016?s=19

A lot comments standing up for women. What was that phrase again, go woke.....?

I hope their good journalists get snapped up quickly by other papers.

Can anyone translate this further? Is there any hope that it's considering appealing to women?

Special mention to the staff who signed the Suzanne Moore denunciation - I wonder how many of them have since had a piece published denying Cancel Culture exists?

Do you mean people like Owen Jones, the final signature, who’s been all over Twitter since the Harper’s letter was published saying cancel culture doesn’t exist?

Hypocritical twat.

He’s clearly Chief Snitch.

This is mostly Twitter news but it sounds like the Weekend edition is getting hit the hardest, so potentially Hadley Freeman loses her column? Why am I not surprised?

mobile.twitter.com/HadleyFreeman/status/1283652632675078144

Sounds like it Flo.

What are the odds on LOJ keeping his column though

Maybe the need to change their name. The Pink Guardian?

Yes, Hadley tweeted today about how sad she was. She was one of the better things about the weekend Guardian.

I'm really sad too. I started reading it as a teenager in the 80s and I revered it. Recently, I got a subscription to the Telegraph when it was going cheap and am surprised at the quality of some of the journalism. (I skim over the awful Tory stuff). Same with The Times. And no, I haven't got more conservative with age, if anything it's the opposite. The Guardian descended into, as a pp put it, your least favourite woke dudebro's Facebook page. Comment is Free is beyond parody these days. There needs to be a great left wing newspaper and it's just gone.

I've been expecting this to happen - I was talking to someone three or four years ago who had just left. He was working in their financial department and said they were more fucked than anyone realised.

@Melroses

I used to get it free from Waitrose, but there just wasn't anything to read, so I got the Telegraph instead, then later The Times - it was either that or the Mail which I had had enough of at MIL's.

It is awful; I was brought up on the Graun but it was not even worth getting free. OJ is dire.

Me too, not going to 'out' myself on twitter by commenting but very sad, it was my paper of choice from very young. But I reached a point a few years ago where it was so bad on women's issues that despite some superb journalists (not OJ obvs) I couldn't even bear to take it when it was free

It will be a really sad day if the Guardian goes to the wall. I haven't read it for some time. I was annoyed with the Janet and John do Socialism style that had begun to invade (anyone remember Janet & John😁).

OJ annoyed the life out of me when I saw some of his screaming rants on the tele and I was very, very disappointed when Poly Toynbee did it too, she was my hero for years, sadly her halo has slipped

@irishfeminist

Yes, Hadley tweeted today about how sad she was. She was one of the better things about the weekend Guardian.

I'm really sad too. I started reading it as a teenager in the 80s and I revered it. Recently, I got a subscription to the Telegraph when it was going cheap and am surprised at the quality of some of the journalism. (I skim over the awful Tory stuff). Same with The Times. And no, I haven't got more conservative with age, if anything it's the opposite. The Guardian descended into, as a pp put it, your least favourite woke dudebro's Facebook page. Comment is Free is beyond parody these days. There needs to be a great left wing newspaper and it's just gone.

I've been expecting this to happen - I was talking to someone three or four years ago who had just left. He was working in their financial department and said they were more fucked than anyone realised.

Agree. I hate most of the Times columnists apart from the wonderful Janice, but the general quality of writing and diversity of opinion is 100 times better than the Guardian.

I too started reading the Guardian as a teenager, when I came to Uni in the UK. It was a revelation at the time to discover I wasn't the only person in the world to have noticed systematic discrimination against women (that might sound crazy to those of you who have grown up with the internet but, in those days, being a feminist in a conservative rural area meant I was in a minority of 1). It's so sad to see what has happened to it.

I didn't leave the Guardian, the Guardian left me.

LOJ is busy claiming in the Guardian today that the results of a dodgy Pink News poll mean that a majority of women unequivocally support self ID. The Guardian senior staff who are still there should be ashamed of what their paper has become, clickbait fake news.

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/3969254-Owen-Jones-says-57-of-women-support-Self-ID

Ah, man, I'm so sorry for Hadley Freeman. And all the other writers losing work.

Thanks for the link, JaniceBattersby. I fully agree that we need more press voices, not fewer. The idea that the Graun represents the left, though, when it's only contained one very narrow part of the left and brooked no dissenting voices for some time seems an important point. I wonder if its dissipation might encourage more curiosity on the left?

Even less reason to read it if Hadley is leaving.

Enraged as I am on a daily basis by the Guardian, I loved the Saturday edition. Weekend not only has Hadley Freeman, it has Tim Dowling and Oliver Burkeman, and the Experience feature, and lots of good lengthy features on interesting topics. The Saturday edition also has the excellent Review section, which is going, and the Guide, which was always a fun read. So I do feel sad. Hadley is a staff writer rather than freelance, so I hope they find room for her column elsewhere in the paper.

The Times takes journalism seriously. Today, a column worth reading (responding to the NYT/Bari Weiss debacle) - the writer may have some political views we wouldn't all espouse, but that's fine. No newspaper should be an echo chamber.

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/heres-the-choice-fall-into-line-or-shut-up-wcmg3bds8?shareToken=87540550d0453085bd44b7efc8f57e8e

Like a PP I also remembered something about the selling off of Autotrader, and management spunking millions up the wall on new offices, and resizing the paper, etc, so googled 'Guardian finances disaster'... only to get lots of stories from May 2019 about how the Graun had in fact reversed its woeful financial record by posting a £800,00 pre tax, pre everything else profit last year, following a three year turn around plan. All based on reader subs and 'give us yer fucking money' Geldof-esque pop-ups at the bottom of pages.

And now this.

This is a pattern repeating itself over and over again in journalism. Twitter opinion feeds into journalism which then seeks twitter approval. We’ve seen it with the Guardian, the NYT and the BBC in just the last week alone.

www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-8528051/MICK-HUME-BBC-boss-admitted-stars-make-mockery-impartial-social-media.html

What all of these ‘news’ organisations fail to grasp is that loud Twitter opinions really don’t represent mainstream and moderate voices or opinions. By simply dismissing any differing viewpoints as ‘far right’ or something-phobic, they just devalue their brands and reputations further and further.

@TheRealMcKenna

This is a pattern repeating itself over and over again in journalism. Twitter opinion feeds into journalism which then seeks twitter approval. We’ve seen it with the Guardian, the NYT and the BBC in just the last week alone.

www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-8528051/MICK-HUME-BBC-boss-admitted-stars-make-mockery-impartial-social-media.html

What all of these ‘news’ organisations fail to grasp is that loud Twitter opinions really don’t represent mainstream and moderate voices or opinions. By simply dismissing any differing viewpoints as ‘far right’ or something-phobic, they just devalue their brands and reputations further and further.

They are spiralling into irrelevance, and they're too lazy even to see it. It's not even about appealing to youth. Most teens and early 20s wouldn't be seen dead on Twitter - it's a mainly a medium for middle-class people aged 25-45 ish (with many exceptions, of course).

Joanna Williams - I guess this is she - wrote an excellent paper for Civitas on transgenderism. I am not a Brexiteer but happy to hear her views and I think she is probably correct. It must have been very difficult to be a Brexiteer in academia.

The closing of debate on transgenderism makes me more sympathetic to the Brexiteers actually. It’s clear to me now in a way it wasn’t previously that some views are deemed unacceptable.

@Binterested

Joanna Williams - I guess this is she - wrote an excellent paper for Civitas on transgenderism. I am not a Brexiteer but happy to hear her views and I think she is probably correct. It must have been very difficult to be a Brexiteer in academia.

The closing of debate on transgenderism makes me more sympathetic to the Brexiteers actually. It’s clear to me now in a way it wasn’t previously that some views are deemed unacceptable.

I do understand Brexiteers' frustration about the lack of coverage for their views on broadcast media prior to 2015, but they did have tonnes of coverage in the Times, Telegraph and all the tabloids, bar the Mirror. By contrast, GC women had no coverage at all until a few brave journalists like Janice T spoke out. And we still have next to no voice in broadcasting - the Today programme has particular form for getting on a couple of men to talk about whether women are allowed to talk about being women

It's ironic that most journalists who tell us there is no cancel culture have studiously ignored the debate about JKR. They know damn well what would happen if they mentioned it, yet they still have the nerve to tell women who complain about being silenced that it's all in our heads. I have just de-subscribed from The Bunker (newsy) podcast, which I used to like, for exactly this reason. They've covered every other UK human rights and political issue you can imagine but - JKR and women's rights? Tumbleweed. Yet they try to tell us that cancel culture is a figment of the Right's imagination. Cowards.

It is the same Joanna Williams. She's also part of Spiked, and has written a whole book on why feminism is a bad idea. (Incidentally, Frank Furedi, currently over the news for his book about why young people are too pampered, is also part of Spiked - they certainly know how to promote themselves.)

Joanna Williams - I guess this is she - wrote an excellent paper for Civitas on transgenderism. I am not a Brexiteer but happy to hear her views and I think she is probably correct. It must have been very difficult to be a Brexiteer in academia.

I remember seeing the very smart Timandra Harkness on Twitter saying that she's pro-Brexit and some academics were taken aback - and she remarked that's because of the default attitude that all smart/educated people are pro-Brexit which made it very difficult for her to have a good faith discussion with anyone.

Why would I donate money to a paper that published the notorious Cologne article? And that's before we even got to their commitment to erasing women's voices from discussions about who should and should not have access to our spaces.

If you effectively tell half the population to piss off they probably will, and will take their money with them. So it goes, I'm afraid. Shame as they used to be a good paper.

Not Hadley!

That's bad news.

This is a pattern repeating itself over and over again in journalism. Twitter opinion feeds into journalism which then seeks twitter approval. We’ve seen it with the Guardian, the NYT and the BBC in just the last week alone.

This^^. I’ve seen numerous BBC ‘news’ articles which quote opinions off twitter as news. Not even opinions of experts in that field, just Jo Public. Not even any attempt to determine if these are representative. It is about as newsworthy and informative as asking my 8 year old son’s friends what they think about the world.