For a while I was the only one reading the Guardian, or so I thought. It started off with me reading the paper Guardian with a cup of coffee. Occasionally I’d laugh at the odd meta-article that crept through, and at myself. Then I found out other people were reading the Guardian too. Not only that, the amount of Guardian produced was being increased exponentially.
There used to be a relatively small range of Guardian, and long term Guardian fans will remember trademarks such as Ian Traynor’s excellent foreign reporting and how good G2 used to be when it first appeared.
Then came Guardian Australia, and Guardian US. Then The Guardian was playing a major role in global politics as Alan Rusbridger was ordered by MI-5 to smash up some hard drives containing sensitive information. Shortly before an article about Alan Rusbridger, by Alan Rusbridger, documenting Alan Rusbridger’s difficulty in playing the piano appeared.
The fact you can get all different types of Guardian, and the fact seemingly everyone is either reading or writing for the Guardian, means that you can now find out what it is like to be Anna Wintour’s (the editor of American Vogue) daughter. Peak oil is actually quite boring, but peak beard is not. You can also attend Guardian workshops on everything from twitter to urbanism run by Guardian affiliated celebrities, and read Chris Huhne (who is apparently not the one who went to prison for lying in court) talk about how bad British politics is. It is now possible to find a Guardian article commenting on any aspect of your life if you type in your area of interest to Google next to the word Guardian. Oddly enough, this rule does not always hold true if you live in Scotland (and Severin Carrell deserves better than being relegated to the Scotland blog, stuck between a rock and a hard place in terms of what he can write and what click rates demand is read)
Like good beer, and good beards, good journalism takes time and cannot be knocked off by anyone with a pen and a view on something – that way blogging lies – any more than reading a lot of books about space makes you an astrophysicist. Like the cause of good beer being appropriated by the hungry brand hipsters of capitalism and the climactically sensible growing of facial hair by the sons of Nathan Barley, I’m not sure I’ll ever get my paper back after peak Guardian. In the last week I’ve attended some exciting meetings on where journalism goes next, and in Scotland that may mean following a different path and a different model to London’s new media.
#1 by Edwin Moore on May 18, 2014 - 7:12 am
Excellent thanks. Yes the Graun’s Comment is Free section has become really quite weird – an article on antisemitism through out the world illustrated with a pic of palestinian children. And agree about Severin, he deserves much better than to be stuck permanently in what amounts to a Punch and Judy window.