Guardian shoots itself in foot with freebie online version? (The Guardian)

Member Name: MHWake

Product:	The Guardian
Date:	09/07/01 (129 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Well written, interesting intelligent news coverage, Good feature writers

Disadvantages: Expensive newspaper, Smug tone

Has the Guardian shot itself in the foot? The paper’s web site now provides some of the most popular components of the paper – from the Cryptic Crossword to the main opinion articles – for free to online readers.

The Guardian is my favourite newspaper. This may be more out of habit and the lack of an alternative than its intrinsic quality. It is an expensive choice, with Saturday's edition costing almost a pound. So is it still worth paying for?

The Guardian in general

It’s an AB type newspaper, in advertising jargon. That is, it’s aimed at professionals, social workers, teachers, and others in the caring professions students, managers, generally at educated people. (Advertisers assume readers will have more money, so they’ll willingly pay more for each reader reached by a Guardian advert than they will pay for tabloid space.)

Its political stance tends to be liberal left of centre but it allows a fairly wide range of political debate on the inside pages, from the Socialist Workers Party (Jeremy Hardy used to be a regular) to the more idiosyncratic Tories.

The Guardian does tend to show all the faults and virtues of its stereotypical reader – a soft left social worker – it can be hypocritical. It will usually sympathise with poor villains but accept no misdeeds from the powerful. Which is fair enough to a point. However, it’s really much happier with its own “people like us.” Charlotte Raven’s attack (first week of July 2001) on the population of Liverpool did not just object to the hysteria of the Bulger coverage but also generally oozed contempt for the uncomfortable working classes, who oddly seem to have trouble coming to term with to the murder of their offspring. (To the credit of the paper, the Editor and the Reader’s Editor – of whom more later – did try to undo the damage Charlotte Raven had done, but not before
the paper received more complaints than on any other issue, many objecting to the almost racist portrayal of Scousers.)

The major fault with the Guardian is its complacent tone. Also, like all the “quality” press (and TV and radio), it provides pleasant and lucrative work for the relatives and friends of a small metropolitan clique. (A couple of weeks ago, Julie Burchill reminded the readers that she was one of the few female writers without a first name like Jacinta and a (usually famous) double-barrelled surname.)

The Paper

It costs quite a lot more than a tabloid, but you get lots of newsprint and written words for your money
Main section (Broadsheet.) National and international news at the front, business news and profiles at the back. Includes the main focus of the newspaper, two facing pages with – on the left -the day’s main political cartoon at top, comment articles below; on the right – editorial and letters to the editor and corrections.
G2 – (Tabloid) Features - including sections on the arts, women, parents, and so on.
Daily supplements – Tabloid –with a content that varies according to the day of the week, e.g Monday is Media, (job adverts & articles.) On other days there are Education, Society, Online (with Science) Office work. Saturday’s paper has a Jobs and Money and a Sports section. Each features large numbers of jobs in that sector.
Guide (small booklet, Saturday) listings & TV guide. Some really funny articles, some space fillers.
Weekend (Saturday glossy magazine) Recently redesigned, it looks nicer but its content is much shallower, with more emphasis on fashion, food, homemaking, gardening sections – tends to feature comically overpriced clothes & furniture.

Best feature writers & cartoonist

Jon Ronson- really funny sometimes, but he’s not in very often anymore. A good “what happened to t
he people in the first Big Brother” article last Saturday. He usually manages to be both snide and sympathetic
Julie Burchill- Sometimes you want to strangle her. Sometimes she writes unique sense. Of all the “controversial” women writers each paper seems obliged to have to stir up readers’ interest, she seems the only one with any genuine journalistic talent. Grim when she’s gushing about Princess Diana or boasting about her working class roots, her reign as Queen of the Groucho in the 80s or her short term part-time lesbianism. Good when she’s writing about most other things, including bitching about her ex-husband (Tony Parsons, whose columns in the Mirror compare so devastatingly badly to hers that you feel you know exactly why she left him.)
Steve Bell- brilliant cartoonist in the Thatcher years, not really doing much amazing now but still good.
Nancy Banks–Smith- Most brilliant TV reviewer ever. Must be about 200 years old and has officially retired but seems to write enough TV reviews for there to be a fair chance you’ll still catch her. The other reviewers are often good but they start with a disadvantage by not being her.
Lots of major writers or significant politicians and so on, from Salman Rushdie to Roy Hattersley, write occasionally for the paper.

Great columnists they used to have

Jeremy Hardy – dead funny about politics
David Stafford – unbearably funny.

Other odds and ends

The paper is known amongst graphics artists (or so I was told by one) for actually commissioning pieces of work to illustrate its pieces, thus almost uniquely enabling artists to survive.

The Guardian also has a Readers’ Editor, whose job involves taking up complaints and explaining the paper’s policies to its readers. It seems pretty fair about putting its mistakes right, with a conspicuous corrections column on the editorial page
.

It used to play excellent April Fool tricks. I haven’t noticed any in the past couple of years, but might not have been paying attention.

Guardian Cryptic Crosswords are legendary, as are the best setters – Araucaria being the acknowledged master. You can now get these straight from the website, classified by setter as well as date (with the answers – if you pick anyone except today’s.)

Guardian Online is the best stab any UK newspaper has made at going online.

I’ve written mainly about the Guardian in entertainment terms, but its news coverage is still the core of the paper. It does a fair job of providing a wide range of news, as opposed to the celeb-obsessed inventions of much of the press. It doesn’t usually smuggle comment into the news. However, it can sometimes be dishonest in presenting the same fake news about celebs as the tabloids, but sneaking it in as comment on the tabloids…..

Summary: