Nick Cohen can always get a job working for the Spectator or something..

Hutton shares much of 97 vintage Nu Lab, but he is first and foremost a Keynesian, a pov Brown has belatedly come round to (and Blair possibly not at all).

Porter may be rightish (I don’t know that much about his background) but can currently be found railing against the State’s trampling of civil liberties week after week after week. Repetitive he might be, Nu Lab he ain’t.

edit (just because I can): and I think The Obs’ foreign coverage has improved in the last 2/3 years. Seems like the only Sunday paper to regularly look beyond Washington for background pieces.

Any problems with the Observer as is is a criticism of the Guardian groups’ sacrificing of the role of the Sunday title – it’s only since the Guardian took over that The Observer stopped the investigations and in-depth foreign coverage it built it’s reputation on.

GMG strategy has put a raft of local papers in peril, but those it has relinquished ownership of have already begun climbing out of the mire as they get back to the fundamentals of proper journalism. Frankly the laziness of filling copy with endless commentary without providing facts is symptomatic of the ‘left’s’ inability to face reality.

Gimpy – of course I do! But if there was a choice between the Guardian and Obs I’ll take the first.

Oh Christ, Im starting to sound like Norman Tebbit. Time for another drink …”

You kind of have a point though. And surely – from a progressive and democratic standpoint – a newspaper cotinuing to hold a significant position because a tiny super-rich organisation think it should is even worse than a newspaper surviving because lots of people – however stupidly – choose to ‘vote with their feet’ and buy it.

Opinion is cheap and ubiquitous – a commodity now – and the generally ill-informed generalists (Toynbee an obvious example) “don’t like it up ‘em”. Well – tough.

Investigations are expensive and rare.

The Torygraph’s publishing of the expenses is obviously worth a million BoJo columns.

Sack the “star” columnists – start with Milne, surely he can’t be paid to write his reactionary rubbish though? – and keep the real journos.

But, as Alan Bennett says on Dead Ringers – they won’t, will they?

but there’s also Will Hutton, Henry Porter, Andrew Rawnsley and Catherine Bennett as regular commentators, who are pretty left of centre.

You’re right about that. I like Hutton, Porter and Rawnsley. But you know what, I like investigations more. And I don’t like to buy newspapers for columnists but news and investigations. And there’s none of that these days at the Obs.

And thomas – it has nothing to do with political leanings. In fact I’m pretty sure the Guardian will support the Libdems too.

Having said that if the papers cant shift the copies in the market then they dont really deserve to survive.

Oh Christ, Im starting to sound like Norman Tebbit. Time for another drink …

The other way round, surely?

Look at it from a party perspective – the Observer is the closest thing to a LibDem paper and he wants it closed down by and subsumed into a Labour paper.

Well, it don’t work like that. GMG would be cutting their nose off to spite their face – looking at the figures the Guardian is declining at three times the rate of the Observer while siphoning away all resounces and strategically undermining it for their own ‘higher’ purposes.

The current Scott Trust directorship are economic and political poison and they deserve to go down with Brown.

Boring! If i wanted to encounter such banalities on a sunday morning I would head to church.

The fact that the observer is run as a loss making enterprise sounds progressive, but is also deeply problematic. If a business sells its goods below cost that artificially keeps competitors out. By the same token the Observer has an extreme and ossified advantage over any other publications that dont get paid to lose millions a year.

the problem with those monthly magazines is that they seem to endlessly expand, and when something isn’t an advertorial, it’s considered ‘important’ by the editor and is thus given about 10 pages in which to bore anyone who’s started it to death (the food one is esp. bad for that). In general, every article could lose at least 1000 words and be just as good (Olympian one a case in point).

And women’s monthly – oh dear. Ill-conceived from the off, and hasn’t got any better. Though the music one runs it close for staggering editorial ineptitude.

I always hated it: it was a combination of hoary old half-funny articles about Premiership football that had been done better in fanzines a decade before – but neither the youngish writers nor their younger target auidence realised this – and pieces by star writers in fields other than sport (e.g. Hugo Young) that tended to demonstrate that they didn’t know any more about sport than anybody else. All aimed at the Observer’s usual thin slice of the population.

The guardian is a left wing middle class paper which believes more power and money to the state can solve most problems. By denying people have an obligation to make any attempt take responsibility for their lives, means more bureaucrats have to be employed to look after their needs. Consequently Guardian will never support any ,moves which help people to lead indpendent lives
if it means the state employing less bureaucrats. After all the royal pension of the 17 and 18 bought loyalty to the monarch. The Observer still believes the individual has a role in running their life.

The Observer still has some very good reporters :Jason Burke has provided superb reports on the Al Queeda and theTaliban; Henry Porter has raised crucial issues about the loss of freedoms and Simon Caulkin has looked at mistakes by management at great length. If we want foreign correspondants who speak the local languages and understand how countries actually function, then they have to be paid. This reporting by journalists who flit from country to country , rarely explain adequately what is happening; hence so many mistakes in foreign and security policy. It was J Burke who exlained Al Queeda was not some rigid structure bit was more akin to a venture capital outfit which provided funds and technical expertise to groups which supported their aims.

In fact I think part of the reason why the Guardian wants the Observer closed down
is the fundemental difference between those who are left wing and those who are liberal. Apparently one of the reasons R Alton was forced out as editor of the Observer was because he wanted to maintain a liberal stance to the paper.

Perhaps if the Observer returne to it’s roots of supporting the craftsmen, engineers and businessmen who gave us the Industrial Revolution then it would have an audience . As increasingly people work for themselves or in small groups; the belief in an ever larger government, employing ever more bureaucrats, none who can be held accountable for their mistakes is likley to become less popular. A truly liberal Observer may be very appealing.

And the women’s magazine! I liked Observer Sport Monthly when it started – then they ruined it with a redesign. But I hated the women’s mag from day one. The Obs ought to be progressive on women’s issues, but all I can recall are articles and opinions that focused on looking good and “having it all”. (Lest you think this is merely a man misunderstanding the oh-so-clever post-post-feminist tone, my attention was only drawn to the mag after my partner spat feathers for five minutes after trying to read it herself.)

the ‘tan in the algarve wearing a £300 swimming costume’ thing is a problem for all the sundays, i think, not just the obs – there’s aspirational stuff and there’s just stupidity… the guardian magazine, to its credit, covers quite a lot of affordable fashion.

edit – this edit function is really good