On The Guardian or, freedom of the press?

I’ve been a loyal and dutiful Guardian reader for more than half a century now. That statement immediately places me in a certain age category, and I need to remind myself that times have moved on. But I do wonder what is happening to the newspaper I’ve known and loved for so long.

I read it because it’s liberal/ social democrat/ vaguely left-leaning, and is the only such newspaper we’ve got in this godforsaken country. I won’t give Murdoch’s press a penny because of the bastard that he is, and the braindead and mouldering columnists of the Torygraph don’t bear thinking about (though you do need to know what the enemy is thinking), the Indy is in hock to the Saudis…only the Guardian finances itself. But did it make the right choice in aiming to be free-to-all rather than paywall itself like the Times, relying on advertising and moving into the US and Australian markets to shore up its finances? It used to be able to boast about its European credentials, but coverage of our near neighbours is pretty thin at the moment.

It’s become a lot more trivial and lifestyle focused, like most of the press nowadays, as if being well-informed about the world is too much like hard work; there are too many vapid columns of comment and twaddle: do I really need 250 words on why someone has cut up their supermarket loyalty card? At a quid a word (or more) it’s money for old rope; then I learnt that the writer is actually the husband of the editor. I mean, can’t they manage on her £400,000+ salary?

Now, let’s get a little more serious: comments by readers. This was an interesting idea when it was first dreamt up, and then trolls discovered they could make hay. But there did use to be a decent enough standard of commenting on articles which appeared in the Guardian. But, increasingly, certain articles are never open for comment, and I find myself wondering why. Larry Elliott is an interesting economics journalist, but also a pro-Brexit headbanger, and when he goes on about Brexit still being a good idea, we can never comment. Simon Tisdall I now regard as their warmonger-in-chief with his crazed articles about the situation in Ukraine, demanding ever more intervention, weaponry and I don’t know what else; again, we’re not allowed to comment on this madness. Why not?

And then there’s the gender debate. There seems to be some sort of actual censorship going on at the paper, as far as I can make out from snippets which have appeared in other media, and the disappearance of interesting (women) columnists who have packed their bags for elsewhere, because apparently the Guardian will not allow gender-critical commentary. Although I also find it strange that such writers, after years at the Guardian, can then go off and take Murdoch’s (or Harmsworth’s) tainted shilling. This is just plain weird, to this long-time reader who has followed umpteen complex feminist debates with interest in the columns of the paper over the decades. What is the Guardian afraid of?

If there were an alternative, I wouldn’t be so worried. I’d just read another paper. But there isn’t, and when progressive readers are driven to wondering what is happening with the only vaguely progressive newspaper we have, we are in trouble. We need to stick together, and it’s getting harder… I’ll carry on reading, and paying for the crosswords. Social media as a source of news is a very worrying concept, as is the idea of whole generations not bothering with serious news at all. The way is wide open for distortion and manipulation, and it’s going on before our eyes.

Rant over; I’ll go any lie down now.

Here is the news…or not

Elsewhere you’ll find posts about my love of newspapers and my newspaper collection; recently while having a tidy-up and clear-out, I found myself looking through my collection again, and various different impressions struck me:

How much more serious and sober newspapers were in the days when they were monochrome! The message was clear: this is news, not entertainment. Almost – therefore, you can trust what you read here. I found a crumbling front page from the Daily News (founded by Charles Dickens, no less) in 1912, where the main headline speculated about what was going on at the South Pole. Had Amundsen got there? Had Scott got there? Scott’s imminent return was awaited…unless he had chosen to spend another season on the ice, continuing his research… There, you also get the sense of immediacy from the time way back when, as well as an even more poignant sense of the tragedy.

Back in those days, some newspapers did not carry news on the front page… The Times resisted up until 1968, I think. Some newspapers eschewed photographs – Le Monde did this I think well into the 1980s. There were far fewer pages: wartime restrictions and paper rationing meant that they often ran to only 4 broadsheet pages. They still managed to fit in pretty nearly everything you’d expect in a newspaper today, using space much more economically. I also looked back through some newspapers from the communist countries: again, few pages, few pictures, and most strikingly, no advertising. I found this very refreshing: the message was, here is the news, rather than, we are trying to sell you something. And yes, I know their idea of news was somewhat different from ours.

The changes creep in gradually, from the late 1970s and early 1980s onwards: more pages, more sections, as daily papers discovered the need to emulate the weekend ones. Designers took over, using white space and eventually colour to create a superficially more attractive product, with more pictures, and more ‘features’, ‘lifestyle’ content; news now occupied an ever smaller proportion of the pages. And articles, both news and commentary, became shorter, perhaps reflecting what television was doing to our attention-span?

Ironically, these developments came along at the time when newspapers themselves were becoming far less ‘relevant’ to more and more people, because the news was on the TV and the radio; these developments may have been intended to arrest the decline of print, but it is now evident that they have singularly failed, when you consider, for instance, a newspaper like the Daily Express that once enjoyed the largest circulation in the land, now a pitiable shadow of its former self, currently selling fewer copies per day than The Guardian or The Times did in their heyday…

It was inevitable, once the internet arrived; the vast infrastructure that distributed tonnes of print around the land overnight was no longer needed; a far more up-to-date news service is now available at the breakfast table than ever dropped through the letter-box. And yet, I am convinced, in many ways we are the poorer for the changes that have taken place over the past half-century. I think we are less clear about what news is, we are less clear about the distinction between news and opinion, and we are less well-informed that we used to be, in spite of, or perhaps because of those changes.

Not the news

    I know I’m not the only person who’s concerned about what’s tritely labelled ‘fake news’. I’ve tried to think through what is actually going on, from the perspective of someone who’s kept himself well-informed over a lifetime.

My interaction with news dates from my earliest years. We took the Daily Mail at home, and listened to the news on the BBC Home Service. That was what was available all those years ago. My earliest memories are of my parents’ anxious faces as they listened to the news of the Cuban missile crisis, their shock at President Kennedy’s assassination, which came in a newsflash just as we children were being sent off to bed, and the news of the death of Pope John XXIII.

I was fascinated by other newspapers and regularly took myself off to the reading room of Stamford Public Library to leaf through the Times and the Daily Telegraph, and take in The Christian Science Monitor (which arrived there daily) and India News. At boarding school we read the Times and the Guardian, and the latter soon became my lifelong newspaper of choice. And when we finally got a television at home, we watched the news.

The thing was, in those days you couldn’t really avoid the news. Most households took a daily paper, often two on Sundays: we took the Sunday Pictorial (which eventually became the Sunday Mirror) and the News of the World, until our mother vetoed it because of its salaciousness. If you paid money for a newspaper, you read it, or much of it, and were consequently reasonably informed. If you listened to the wireless (I love that word!) you got the news whenever it came along. And there were regular news bulletins on the TV, too.

Now, think through what has changed. There are so many TV and radio channels where there are no news bulletins. There are enough TV and radio channels for enough people to avoid the news completely, and if you consume your music through apps like Spotify, there’s no news, just like there’s none on Netflix and other streaming TV channels.

The internet has massacred the printed newspaper: papers like the Mirror, Sun, Daily Express that used to sell four or five million copies a day now sell a tenth of that number. People do not read newspapers, by and large. News has migrated to the internet, and most people’s expectations are that it will be free. I do not pay £2.20 a day for a printed newspaper any more, and haven’t done for years. Some newspapers have paywalls; I don’t bother. So even though I have a wealth of free news available to me, somehow I am less informed, because I don’t read everything in that day’s Guardian – I don’t even know the totality of what’s in it. I skim, superficially, like a wasp – because it’s free, it has less value, less significance. Interestingly, the printed news and analysis I pay 5.40€ per month for in Le Monde Diplomatique, I still read from cover-to-cover.

News has become more trivial, more personality focused. Is this perhaps the result of the changes I’ve outlined above? I think the two phenomena are linked. I’ll listen to radio news in the car while I’m driving, for as long as I can bear it, but I don’t bother with television news any more.

So, I consider myself pretty well-informed, and yet I’m clear that I graze the news. I’ll also admit this is partly an age thing: I’ve seen a lot of it before, and I know that my opinions and actions aren’t really going to make any difference in what’s left of my lifetime. What about the millions who avoid the news almost entirely?

Newspapers have no obligation to be objective, and so news and commentary or opinion pieces have long been jumbled together. The terrestrial TV stations in the UK are by law obliged to be politically balanced or impartial. Social media can do what it likes, and we know where that has taken us: anyone can post anything they like, pretty much, truth or lies, and nobody can do much about it. For all their hand-wringing pieties, the US giants of social media don’t really have a clue what goes on on their platforms, nor do they care as long as the bucks continue to pour in.

Somewhere it seems to me that all of this ought to matter deeply, to concern all of us if participating in a democracy means anything to us. And yet, apart from a relatively small number, it really doesn’t. And there are plenty of people, organisations and companies who will do very well indeed as democracy dies. It’s not that I think that as a society we used to be well-informed, just that now I feel we are much less informed, and also much more susceptible to ignorance and disinformation. And that cannot end well. Nor do I have a realistic solution to offer.

On my newspaper collection

I have collected newspapers since I was a child. I don’t know where the fascination came from, but I think my early exposure to foreign languages developed it. I loved to look at the different mastheads, comparing what information they showed, the colours they used, how modern or antiquated they looked. Friends and relatives found the idea just a little cracked, I think, but they humoured me, often bringing a paper back from their travels; teachers at school did the same.

Different countries and languages did things differently; there were newspapers that completely eschewed photographs – Le Monde until the 1970s being one of them – or carried advertisements on the front page instead of news – The Times did this until the mid 1960s. When we travelled to Poland for the first time in 1970, I was astonished by the newspapers of Eastern Europe. Most of them only had four very flimsy pages, with absolutely no advertising. They were all published by the central committee of the national or local communist party or equivalent, and almost all carried the slogan “Workers of the World, Unite!” in their respective languages as part of the masthead. I still find the notion of newspapers and magazines without advertising very attractive today, although they exist almost nowhere, now.

I gradually became more fascinated by two things: newspapers in different languages and different scripts than the Roman alphabet, and newspapers from the past. When I was a teacher, my students were always ready to bring back a paper from their travels or holidays. It took me a long time to get a school student to bring me back a newspaper in Maltese, which is the only Arabic language that uses the Roman alphabet, and I’m still hoping to get to know someone heading to Mongolia, for I’d love a newspaper in that script… Some of the alphabets and scripts from the Far East are absolutely beautiful. Of course, I can understand very few of the languages, but it’s amazing how much logic, photographs and knowledge of what a newspaper is for, will allow one to deduce. My copy of Al Ahram (from Cairo) came in very useful when we were studying poems from other culture and traditions, as part of GCSE English – it was a graphic prop to show the class how the language and news of another culture could be completely inaccessible to us Westerners, and brought a sense of perspective, reminding us that there were other worlds and cultures out there, which were not ours.

As time passed I became increasingly fascinated by newspapers from the past, how different they were, and how they presented events with immediacy, unlike reading about those events in a history book. I had a phase of scouring derelict buildings for old newspapers, and was once lucky enough to come across a huge pile of them from 1939, before and after the outbreak of war, in a shop that was being refitted: no doubt the builders thought I was crackers but they happily gave me them…

Equally I realised that newspapers recording major events were worth keeping – all those reporting the first moon landing, various royal weddings and deaths, 9/11 and the like. Also I kept first and last editions of various newspapers as they appeared in and disappeared from circulation.

So, I’ve indulged an oddball hobby for most of my life, and have several crates of newspapers of some value in the attic, though whether I can ever bear to part with them is another matter. Printed newspapers are slowly dying out in the internet age; even I no longer buy them in order to keep up with the news. I toyed with the idea of journalism as a career possibility, having worked on the students’ union newspaper at university, but ultimately decided against it as a less safe one than teaching, and I cannot say that I regret my decision.

Newspapers: do they have a point any more?

Today my newspaper of choice, which I’ve read daily for nearly half a century – The Guardian – became a tabloid. It looks okay, but no longer has anything which makes it stand out from any of the other dailies. The short-lived bold Berliner experiment ran out of steam and money: no-one could have foreseen how rapidly so many people would give up print for online news… and I found myself thinking: is there any real point to newspapers any more?

Once, newspapers were the only news; first radio and then TV scooped them. And now the internet offers instant updates. Once newspapers offered news; now they try to offer everything: a whole range of features, opinion, columnists trying to be funny, cookery, lifestyle, advice on relationships. Once newspapers had relatively few pages and were readable on the day of publication in a reasonable space of time; now there are pages to plough through. Once the Sunday paper was a treat to gorge on.

I only occasionally buy a print Guardian at a weekend, and when I do, it’s frustrating, because I’ve read half of it before, at different times during the week: online articles aren’t attached to particular days, and the overall effect is to make it even less likely I’ll bother with print. And I suspect I only look at about a quarter of what appears online, anyway.

I could never have imagined life without my daily dose of print, and yet, here I am, reading the paper online every morning – no more cold and wet trips to the corner newsagent. It comes rather cheaper, of course, and this is an issue for all newspapers: where’s the money? The Guardian seems, slowly, to be finding its way with a subscription and donation model, helped by the web broadening its world readership. And I grind my teeth about the random and irrelevant US and Australian stories. But they get some cash from me because I love the online crossword app.

The Times disappeared behind a paywall, but I won’t give money to Murdoch on principle, end of story. The Daily Telegraph, which I used regularly to look at to see what the enemy was up to, has developed a ‘premium’ (ie give us money) label for an ever-increasing number of its stories, and this has led to a bastardisation of good journalism, in that most stories now begin with a couple of paragraphs of knitted words that tell you nothing, in order to tempt you to stump up money to read the real article just as it disappears behind the paywall… ha ha, fooling no-one there… On the other hand, I do have access to far more titles, whereas I only ever bought one print newspaper a day.

As I grow older I regularly have to remind myself that I’m not the regular or average punter that most newspapers (or shops, for that matter) actually want; I’m on the margins, looking for something that doesn’t really exist. When I began reading newspapers, I wanted (and found) the news reported clearly, fully and intelligently, and some detailed and thoughtful analysis to develop my understanding of issues. That’s pretty rare now, particularly the analysis, for which I’ve gone to a French publication, Le Monde Diplomatique (there is an English edition) for the last twenty years. English newspapers are full of rent-a-scribe columnists paid by the yard to pontificate, to provoke or to try and be funny, none of which is terribly useful in terms of trying to understand an increasingly mad world.

I can’t see print newspapers existing for much longer; I can see them shrinking to weekly publications focused on analysis rather than news, although I suspect the ‘infotainment’ angle will still dominate. There will be far fewer of them. Someone will eventually sort out how to make micropayments work, I hope.

The thing that depresses me more than anything is the large number of people I see picking up and paying for the Daily Mail, imagining they are buying a proper newspaper, rather than a nasty, right-wing propaganda-sheet. It says something about the very sad state of this country at the moment.

My A-Z of Reading: N is for Newspapers

I’ve always been fascinated by newspapers; I collect them: historical events and countries of the world. So if any of my readers are in a position to get me a newspaper from Mongolia or Greenland – in a local language – I’ll be very grateful, as these are gaps in my collection. Similarly, I’m open to offers for my copy of The New York Times (genuine) reporting the first manned moon landing…

Newspapers have been around for well over three centuries, and one of the things that interested me as a child was that my home town claimed the oldest local paper in the land, the Lincoln, Rutland and Stamford Mercury as it was then. I cringe at having been brought up reading the Daily Mail, a rag the country should genuinely be ashamed of. But at boarding school we were provided with The Guardian and The Times and it has been the former that I’ve stuck with all my life.

Newspapers were serious publications; I say were advisedly, for they have changed beyond all recognition in my lifetime. They used to be straightforward, black and white publications with perhaps sixteen to twenty broadsheet pages, containing news, sport, a couple of pages of comment and analysis, and different pages on different days reviewing concerts, books and the like. Today we have largely tabloid newspapers, in colour – often lurid – and several sections: far more paper, and far more froth and knitted words filling them. It often seems that any nonentity who can’t write a sentence can be a columnist. And all the lifestyle nonsense and celebrity stuff, even in the most serious of papers. The Daily Telegraph – known as the Morning Fascist to me (know your enemy) – used to be a serious newspaper of record in which one could ignore the rabid columnists and laugh oneself silly at the Peter Simple column. Now it is a shadow of its former self.

Television and the internet have happened, and newspapers in Britain don’t know what to do with themselves. The Germans have the answer, I feel: serious and sober, few concessions to the latest trends, it seems, and focusing on quality, in-depth reporting and analysis. Le Monde used to do this in France – a newspaper famous for not using any photographs at all back in the old days. But it has changed, and caught the British disease. And Liberation, which mocked everyone and everything, a newspaper for anarchists – look at it now! And the culture of local and regional dailies helps both France and Germany avoid most of the worst excesses of our gutter press.

Let’s be serious for a moment. I’m not buying a newspaper for news any more. News I get online. Even newspapers recognise this and go to print earlier and earlier in the evening. So what can a newspaper offer that the web and television can’t? In-depth reporting, and serious political and social analysis still reads better – to me, but am I just old? – in print. Articles about culture, books, education and music are plentiful online, but I like reading good writing in print. Do I need colour for this? Not very much, to be honest. And do I need a dose of this every day? Again, probably not. A decent newspaper could probably come out twice a week, just as some did a couple of centuries ago, or even weekly, which is what Sunday newspapers do, or in countries like France and Germany where the culture of the weekly news magazine is still strong, what magazines like L’Obs or Der Spiegel do.

Newspapers are wrestling with how to survive and make money in the internet age, but do not seem to be trying much that’s new. Where is micro-payment for articles, where are sensible and clear subscription options in Britain? I feel awkward – I won’t admit to more than that – reading so much stuff for nothing, and I block ads because newspapers farm out advertising to all sorts of weasels who spray malware in all directions. I’d pay for stuff if there was a sensible way and I knew what I was getting if I signed up to a subscription deal. I’ve tried several times to get The Guardian to tell me what exactly I would get for being a subscriber and they haven’t responded… so no money from me.

I can’t see newspapers actually disappearing – though I’d like the Sun and the Daily Mail to, and The Independent has vanished from print, but what will I be reading in ten years time?

Newspapers: a digression

It occurred to me that I have spent a lot of time reading newspapers; I’ve been fascinated by them since my youngest years, and indeed have collected them since then, newspapers from all parts of the world bought back by friends and acquaintances who have visited far-flung parts, and newspapers recording great events during my lifetime. Note to readers: I’m still looking for a newspaper in Mongolian script, from that country…). I remember exploring derelict houses looking for old newspapers in my younger days, and finding them, too.

Newspapers contain frozen glimpses of the past, and that’s one of the reasons I find them so appealing: a history book has an overview, the benefit of hindsight, reflection and analysis, whereas a day’s paper only has what is known up to the previous evening, along with the unknown. So, my copy of The Daily Telegraph dated 7 June 1944 tells us that the Allies have successfully landed in Normandy – that’s all. Yes, now we know that they weren’t flung back into the sea by the Nazis, but readers on that day didn’t, and their perspective was different, and it’s only by going back to the newspapers of the time that we can perhaps understand that.

Newspaper history seems to me to fall into four eras. There is the period of print only, lasting from the seventeenth to early twentieth century: very sober-looking newspapers, with small print and small headlines, usually only the width of a single column. Pictures appear after the end of the Great War; there are what we recognise as headlines, there are greater efforts with layout and design, and often newspapers of considerable beauty. When we get to the 1990s, colour begins to replace monochrome, eventually driving it out completely, and often producing something rather garish, too concerned with being eye-catching rather than informative, desperate to be as good as TV when that wasn’t possible. And the most recent transformation is still ongoing, with the transfer from print to the web; no-one is sure how far this will go, whether print newspapers will survive or disappear, and whether this will be any great loss or not… Personally, I can’t see the daily print editions of newspapers surviving much longer; I think we may revert to weekly editions, perhaps more magazine-like; indeed this seems to be happening in some countries.

Britain has some of the oldest newspapers in the world, such as The Times, The Observer and The Guardian; other countries have had to re-invent their press after the Second World War, such as France, where all the dailies had collaborated with the wartime regimes and were shut down; newspapers had to be re-invented in Germany too, many having disappeared voluntarily post-1933 and the rest having been assimilated into the Nazi press. Post 1989, many of Eastern Europe’s newspapers have managed to re-invent themselves after being government mouthpieces for many years… you can still get Pravda, though Lenin might not recognise it!

Newspapers are ephemera. Many items in my collection are yellowing and crumbling. They were perhaps much more powerful in the past than they are now, sidelined as they are by television and the internet, with plummeting circulations and increasing irrelevance. But their disappearance would be a great loss, I think.