UKC

goes bust?


https://www.ft.com/content/bb757f70-0bc3-11e6-b0f1-61f222853ff3


It's been under financial difficulties for some time now, and has had a begging bowl out on the website for some time.

Can the UK afford to be without a quality left-leaning rag?

In reply to Big Ger:
Yes I've noticed the 'since you're here' addenda on their news pages. I think i'm going to have to give them some cash as, apart from the daily mash, I've nowhere to go to get a balanced view in this rabid murdoch led world of media hate/lies/trivialisation.

In reply to Big Ger:

plus kind of ironic that you've linked to a f*cking berlin paywall

In reply to Big Ger:

http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/media/woman-chooses-coffee-over-safeguar...

In reply to pasbury:


Surely having a "balanced view" means getting news from both sides?

Times and the Guardian for me.

In reply to Big Ger:

Times
Sun
Mirror
Mail
Express
Telegraph
Independant
Guardian
Star

Have I missed any?

what is the locus of these papers in terms of editorial position

In reply to Big Ger:

and is this even relevant to how news is disseminated

In reply to pasbury:











The Cornishman.

In reply to pasbury:












I'd say the locus measured by titles is right of centre by a smallish margin, but if you measure by circulation it's right of centre by a substantial and worrying amount.

Martin

In reply to Big Ger:
- agreed

- agreed

- not barmy, populist confused

- WHAT! far right nazi f*cking bonkers indoctrination more like

- yes, as above plus stupid apocalyptic weather forecasts (and immigrant hatred)

- f*ck me for saying this but 'sensible right'

- agreed

- agreed but the only editorial team that wants to keep up this position

- this was a joke - tits


The Cornishman.

In reply to pasbury:

I think your analysis is almost spot-on. Whoever could have thought the Mail was *centre* barmy?

In reply to pasbury:


We'll have to agree to disagree on that one. As far as I can see the Fail will support anything, left or right orientated, no matter how lunatic, if it flogs papers.

In reply to Big Ger:
No we can't do without a quality paper. I'm a supporter and we should all be. It's at times of emergency that right thinking people (I am one and I'm not taking questions) need to do something. Subscribing to or just buying a respectable newspaper is not such a little act. When alt-Truth is ruling the free world anybody who can think needs to do something... and keep doing it, at least until the danger goes away.

In reply to Big Ger:

Bollocks - it's take on the judges in the Article 50 case first round was utterly execrable.

In reply to pasbury:

I think we've determined your thoughts on the political slant of the Fail now.

This thread is, however, about another paper.

In reply to Pete Pozman:


Well, all left leaning people should, it is in their interest.

In reply to Big Ger:


Kernow-centric hard right with a deep mistrust of Devon?

In reply to pasbury:


Sadly it has gone downhill badly over the last few years. The Barclays brothers havent been good for it.

Think the Guardian needs to seriously consider at least partial charging. The only paper which has really managed the digital strategy is the mail and thats by having two very distinct audiences. Paper the traditional lot and the site the heat lot with the sidebar of shame.

In reply to richprideaux:


Hardliner "jam on first" stance.

In reply to Big Ger:


Fixed that for you

In reply to Big Ger:

and quite right too!

In reply to KevinD:

I read the guardian for my soft side but the telegraph business pages to get a bit of reality...

In reply to Big Ger:





What have you done with the real Big Ger? Cordial responses, politeness, thoughtfulness - something's not right.

In reply to SenzuBean:
Wait until someone insults me,

youtube.com/watch?v=bgLfOrVJJMg&

In reply to Big Ger: since the standard of journalism and comment in the Telegraph has slowly gone down the bog I've actually wondered where to get quality tight leaning journalism in the UK. The mail and express are just unfunny parodies of the mash.

Guardian, economist and New Statesman from the uk for me, but what else?

In reply to Big Ger:

Spot on...
They stories vary from "look at this example of a feckless father we've found with 56 kids living off the state" to "look at this poor immigrant that no one will help" to batshit crazy anti constitutional rants against judges to look how terribly this girl is treated just for walking round the streets looking attractive to condemning child sexualization, following it up with the next week "look charlotte church is 16 and legal" and many many "sweet sixteen" celeb stories not to mention the "accidental" holiday z-list exposees.

They are hateful, predominantly Right wing geared toward the hard of thinking but above all mercanary

In reply to wbo:


Are we on the same page here?

In reply to Big Ger:



quite, but how do you balance if there's no one that wants to go on the other side of the see-saw? fake news anyone?

In reply to balmybaldwin:

Add all that stuff up in the uk's 2nd best selling newspaper and it does have a corrosive influence.

Especially when the best selling is the Sun.

In reply to balmybaldwin:

Exactly, and the whole intent of this thread.

In reply to pasbury:



Any thoughts on the Guardian, and it's potential demise?

In reply to wbo:


The Spectator to balance the New Statesman?

In reply to Big Ger:

I guess they left it too late to put up something like a paywall. Let's face it; printed news media will die, I haven't bought a paper in 10 years. I go online the the BBC or the Guardian or NY Times! - that's my preference (as an aside I used to go to the Independent until it started to follow the clickbait model).

It's a question of trust and perceived authority - maybe nothing will have that property in the future. Then where can we get a truthful picture; will the 'alternative facts' outnumber the 'facts'?

In reply to Big Ger:
If it wasn't for the Guardian's hypocrisy over tax, and on worker's rights a little bit too - to do with ob security for it's staff, and making use of unpaid work(ers), I'd feel more like supporting it, but I agree that the UK can't afford to lose it as a paper. Which probably means I should do.

I had a nice latte today...

In reply to pasbury:


Private eye? You don't have to read three papers and the BBC to get all the angles on a story.

In reply to jonnie3430:

Private Eye is highly recommended.

I had a subscription when I lived in the UK, and kept it going when I moved out here.

In reply to pasbury:

Although the Independent now seems pretty barmy. It's basically turned into Buzzfeed.

In reply to Big Ger: Forgotten the Spectator - I haven't looked at it in a while . RIGHT leaning newspapers.....

I tohught the Independent had dumped all it's journo's and was just agglomerating other news sources so the Buzzfeed analogy is rather close to the truth.

In reply to Big Ger:

Is that the newspaper that dodged £80million in Tax when selling Autotrader by using an off-shore Tax haven?

In reply to pasbury:





Aimed squarely at the illiterate

JW

In reply to Timmd:

Yes the begging bowl hacks me off, too. If I can be arsed I will drop them an email one day, along the lines that I wold be happy to pay for content if the profits did not disappear in some tax haven.

Otherwise, Sueddeutsche Zeitung on paper, NZZ, NYT, and Guardian online.

CB

In reply to KevinD:


That's because the Barclays are a bunch of b*stards - they're slowly but surely ruining the beautiful Isle of Sark next to where they live in an effort to take it over.

In reply to Big Ger:

The guardian has, to an extent, followed the Mail model. The website has a much more international focus, especially Australia and America, and also has lots more clickbaity opinion pieces that aren't really aimed at its paper readership.

I suppose the underlying problem for all news outlets are things like the huffington post and niche bloggers. That , and a generation who if they look at news at all, is on msn type aggregator apps on their phone, which by their nature, only take news from free websites. A destructive cycle of something for nothing

Fake news didn't appear out of nowhere, either.

In reply to toad:


I blame facebook and twitter,

CB

In reply to pasbury:


Guardian is not "balanced"; it's left.
If it goes, the next soft-left news source is BBC

As someone once pointed out

"The number at the top of the Daily Mail is not the circulation, it's the number of c*nts in the country".

In reply to JJL:

If the BBC is perceived to be on the left at all it's because the country has been moving ever right for decades now. Blair slowed, rather than reversed, the trend. Almost certainly the BBC line has moved too in an attempt to maintain a centrist position, but in recent years I doubt the BBC has been moving as fast and as far as Cameron and May as they've been speeding into terrain we used to associate with US parties.

In reply to john arran:
A fair point re the move to the right and the perception of the BBC.

My Momentum friends think the BBC is a right wing pro establishment sell out.

My more right wings chums think it's a hotbed of liberals and the alumni of Crowd Sociologists from Neasden Polytechnic.

I suspect it's "gender confused".

In reply to Big Ger:

It might be worth noting that the Guardian is the only (I think) national paper to be run by a trust. No interfering owners with higher agendas. Also interesting that come general election time a vote is taken on the floor by the Journalists about who the paper should back. Or so Alan Rushbridger recorded anyway.

Nobody has mentioned the i. Presumably because it's part of the Indy? I think it's a decent attempt to get serious journalism out there at a competitive price.

In reply to Nevis-the-cat:



On behalf of my late mother, that is just totally offensive. Just because you buy a paper for the crossword or the articles does not automatically align you with the most extreme of the editorials.

In reply to pasbury:

Well, the very one big Ger links to in his post, The FT. Although I would self describe myself as left leaning when I started reading the FT (free paper copy in my last work place) I was surprised to find the FT to be fairly neutral/ sensible in its political/opinion pieces etc.

In reply to GrahamD:

My folks read it, apparently the telly pages are very good.

I cracked this joke with them (suitably edited) and they just told me I was a typical bloody Guardian reader.

In reply to Big Ger:

Been thinking about it. I have contributed to Wikipedia before. So I have form...

Like you (!) I read both The Times and Guardian.

I find The Telegraph unpalatable. Too for to the right. I might as well talk to my father in law!*

The Econmoist and Prospect are other occasional reads.

*Not all that bad. I exaggerate.

In reply to Big Ger:

I'm another guardian supporter. I delayed for a long time due to annoyance over the fact that most of the "Supporter events" are in London, but Brexit and Trump pushed me over the edge. In addition to the standard reporting, the "Long Reads" podcast is excellent and well worth £50 a year

In reply to Nevis-the-cat:



Agenda confused, surely?

In reply to Big Ger:

Private Eye is great, I like the way people will write in to correct them where they're wrong too.

In reply to Nevis-the-cat:


The most nutty on any side will always consider any news source slightly to the left/right of them as being biased.
In addition the BBC does have various bias one way or the other in different departments.

In reply to Indy:


It cannot be. If the Graun did that it would be hypocritical. They would never behave in a way that they spend so much time criticising others for.

They are lefties, they cannot do any wrong.

In reply to JJL:



I get the impression the BBC is drifting far further left than the Graun.

In reply to Nevis-the-cat:



A perfect left wing response, nothing to do with the topic, childish, unnecessary, totally untrue, and hypocritically sexist. Well done.

In reply to Nevis-the-cat:





Perhaps 'impartial' would be the word.

In reply to Big Ger:


Funny though

In reply to Big Ger:
The BBC was blackmailed by the Tories into shifting solidly behind their agenda - "Get behind us or we'll cut your budget and let Murdoch ravage you!" It's far from socialist. Check out this article: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/17/bbc-leftwing-bias-non...

Before you start up "But, it's from the Guardian!", "But it's written by Owen bloody Jones!", read down to where he describes the links between the BBC and the Tories - "The chairman of the BBC Trust is Chris Patten, a former Conservative cabinet minister. The BBC's political editor, Nick Robinson, was once chairman of the Young Conservatives. His former senior political producer, Thea Rogers, became George Osborne's special advisor in 2012...", etc.

Academic studies have also shown that the BBC actually follows the news agenda set by the political right (including the "moral panic" loud-mouthed Tories induced about whether or not the BBC was "too left-wing"). It's not just what the BBC or the Murdoch press report; it's also what they don't report. They frame events in ways that limit discussion to a very narrow political spectrum, which lets the Tories get away with murder (literally).

For me the Guardian isn't a left-wing newspaper: it represents a liberal middle class that is content with the status quo, but vaguely concerned about the rank abuses of power associated with the War on Terror and austerity and revealed by the Leverson Enquiry and the Panama Papers. What it certainly isn't is working-class or socialist. There are no papers that fit that description.

We've a government that is unelected, vandalising the economy, deepening social inequality, increasing child poverty, running the NHS into the ground, hounding immigrants (i.e. us and our friends and families, colleagues, students, doctors, etc.), destroying European-wide projects that have taken ages to build up (e.g. UK nuclear power research making breakthroughs in fusion; university research and OS student recruiting; environmental protections; development funding for deprived, deindustrialised towns like Merthyr, etc.), and all the time handing over public wealth and assets to their mates, or helping themselves into a lucrative and early retirement. They're disgusting cretins. But, nowhere are they opposed or exposed by the 2-bit, crony newspapers, most of which are monopolised by a liver-spotted Australian fascist with a Twitter account.

In reply to C Witter:

I can see no common ground for us on this one, apart from your correct assertion;

In reply to Big Ger:

When Rusbridger (Cranleigh, Magdalene) was editor they ran stories against Cameron et al for their privileged backgrounds, yet most of the senior Guardian positions went to public school Oxbridge alumni. And Rusbridger's daughter famously walked into a cushy guardian media job despite a lack of qualifications - she got 'work experience' with a Guardian internship and was later hired by Rusbridger's PA.

Recently they've been investigating the Panama papers and targeting tax avoidance, yet the Guardian Media Group used a Cayman Islands shell company to flog Auto Trader and avoid paying corporation tax.

The first time I heard of Cameron was when the Guardian gave him a column as a prospective MP, and they helped him into power when they deserted Gordon Brown for Nick Clegg in 2010. Were they ever really 'left wing' or was it just marketing.

In reply to Big Ger:

It's such a 'horrible', nasty, mean paper. I'd not line an animal's cage with it out of sympathy for what it'd have to live amongst.

At least, as a lefty, I can see papers like the Times just have a different point of view, but the Mail is truly awful. They called the death of a gay pop star 'Poignant, unnatural and sad' because he happened to be gay and died young, and their online content about prepubescent girls (now deleted after online outcry) is awfully creepy, talking about girls aged around ten 'Stealing the show' when they're just walking next to their mum. or about them being leggy like their model mums, or being 'all grown up', when they're still circa 13.

I know of a couple of nice people who seem to buy it, but I'm stumped over why, if they want to read something right wing there's always the Times. The Daily Mail just doesn't seem to give a shit about having any decency.

People can caricature me as a pigeon holing lefty if they like, I genuinely don't care...

In reply to Big Ger:

Always thought the question of news bias is an interesting one.
Is the bias judged by positions of various outlets relative to each other or.....their positions relative to objective facts?

In reply to redjerry:

A very interesting question.

I would have said that the positions are relative to our own personal prejudices.

In reply to redjerry:

It's not "relative" to anything. It involves thinking "what kind of people get heard in the media?" and "what kind of people don't get heard in the media?" "What is the overall, accumulated message of these newspapers?" "What remains undiscussed?" If anyone asks themselves these questions in a spirit of intellectual honesty, they will see how far to the right public debate has shifted - particularly in the last 10 years. They will see that the media is dominated by the voices and material interests of the wealthy, whilst the working class gets a patronising bit role, which depends upon whether it suits the editors to appeal to them as (mindless) consumers ("Busty Jane Bares All on Page 3"; "Kate Middleton's Royal Wardrobe Malfunction"), portray them as a waste of air ("scroungers"), violent ("thugs and muggers"), or as the "authentic" source of support for their anti-working class editorial positions ("tax payers disgusted by family of scroungers with record of thuggery, who claim benefits for their family of 10"). The working class only participate in the media as a spectral projection of the powerful. "Ordinary people want us to crack down on immigration", they say. Who are these ordinary people? Aren't they immigrants, too? Or the family, friends, neighbours or colleagues of immigrants? Don't they also want other things, like a well-functioning NHS, good schools, jobs with decent working conditions and more free time to actually live and enjoy themselves? Don't they also want government to crack down on tax havens and zero-hour contracts and to stop selling off public wealth at discount prices to greasy spivs like Richard Branson?

Bah! If you can't see this, you only have yourselves to blame that the country is so screwed up.

In reply to Big Ger:

We subscribe to The Guardian (online edition, £13 a month). My wife has commented that this is a waste of money as you can read the same stories/articles on their website for free! The subscription is being cancelled today.

In reply to C Witter:


Morning Star, Communist Review. There's a couple. Not so much the CR.

In reply to C Witter:

Don't disagree C witter...however I was really asking at a much more basic level.
In the US, where I live, an absence of bias is often taken as giving equal voice to opposing viewpoints.
To me, that is meaningless (which is sort of what you are saying) unless both viewpoints have an equal basis in objective fact.

The classic example in the states is climate change....where, for nearly two decades, lots of discussions seemed to involve a scientist who actually studied the subject and a lawyer from an oil-industry funded think tank. To me that showed a media bias because it was giving equal weight to viewpoints that did not have equal basis in fact.

In reply to Big > Mail: Centre barmy

Yikes!
well right of Nazi I'd say and thats being kind!
After all they supported the Nazi party before the second world war started and little seems to have changed.

In reply to crisp:


Look at the comparative readerships for British newspapers. If you expect truth or adult opinion for nothing you will finish up with nothing except the sub-Nazi filth provided by the Daily Mail and only slightly more respectable agenda of the Murdoch empire. You might not want to march/take direct action but the least you can do is pay the journalists who provide real information especially in these dangerous alt-Truth days.
Pay up mate, you can afford it.

In reply to crisp:


Rather stupid. Good journalism costs money. (And presumably you think it's good, since you take the trouble to read it.) If nobody pays for it, it'll vanish.

In reply to Rob Parsons:

Or, worse, go the way of The Independent.

In reply to Pete Pozman:

My point is that we subscribe and read The Guardian BUT without subscribing you can read the newspaper for free. That does not sound like an incentive to get people to subscribe.

In reply to crisp:


I get that. Think of the 'incentive' as being the viable continuation of the paper (in whichever form - i.e. printed, or on-line - it takes.) It costs money to produce it and, if doesn't get enough, it'll eventually disappear.

In reply to Big Ger:

I read The Guardian and The Times and have done so for many years and I presume the financial difficulties are due to dwindling readership. Times change: we once had a Liberal Government.

In reply to Big Ger:

Ry

In reply to Big Ger:

........or just taking the piss out of a particularly unpleasant, corrosive rag. Sexist my arse.

What exactly is a lefty in your world then ? I suspect it's anyone who's not in the Monday Club.

In reply to Rob Parsons:


Or maybe they should revise their business model so that it does not involve giving away all their content for free. If the left want quality newspaper they should pay for it. Maybe then they can get back to their roots of quality journalism rather then the constant slew of piss poor click bait articles that do nothing except further destroy its diminishing reputation as a serious publication..

In reply to Cú Chullain:


That isn't an 'or' to the point I was making.

All newpapers are still trying to figure out how to make their businesses viable in the new age of digital media; I wasn't suggesting for a moment that The Guardian is currently getting that right.

In reply to Nevis-the-cat:


Anyone who is politically left of Genghis Khan.

In reply to poppydog:


I read somewhere (no source, sorry) that they actually have relatively high online readership stats, but are failing to monetize them effectively.

In any case, I had a think and decided that for all the things that are annoying about the Graun, not least their tax affairs, I'm pretty glad that there's a major news outlet publishing the sort of stuff that they publish, so I went and bunged them some cash. I'd encourage other people to do so too if they feel similarly.

(Sorry about the late thread-bump, btw.)