Our local newspaper is massive. It only has a circulation of 10k but it is huge and old looking. It is quite lovely, right up to the point that you actually want to find something or recognise someone in the photographs. In fact, functionally it is mostly useless apart from providing a local browse function and taking money from hapless estate agents. Search is impossible but browsing can sometimes lead to some information that you didn't know you wanted. Ask most people here and they don't want it changed. People resist change (i'm not going to say 'comfort zone' here and if you use that phrase stop it). The Guardian went compact in.....(actually do you say 'if it ain't broken don't fix it'? you have to stop that too) I can't remember when the Guardian went compact but reading it today I don't think anyone is saying "ooh I'd like bigger pages". Change for the better can be made, resist and embrace change, it is your discretion that counts.
Discretion and newspapers, my goodness, media is fantastic and the fast changing world of media is startling. As if newspapers aren't in enough flux and just as Mr Murdoch seems to have invented a working paywall and is also on the brink of taking over his own world of media, some large weeds work their way into his garden and the public become outraged and his whole empire looks decidedly shaky. Schadenfreude can't actually be a German word as it is so central to our British psyche. That and feeling sorry for the undone so we will learn to love him soon.
The Guardian has been writing about phone hacking for years, literally years! I first started to get mad last year when the police seemed to dismiss the hacking of politicians mobile phones. What the blue blazes?! I just don't care for many politicians but only Prescott seemed to take this to a common sense 'Gelfdof' level. At first it seemed it was dismissed because all you had to do to 'hack' a mailbox was to call it up and use the standard PIN, not really illegal, bit like speeding. The wider implications of security and data and outright dangerous illegal activity seemed at the time to have been missed. The sad thing about our great British public is that they can't really be arsed to feel strongly about wider legal issues that they feel don't directly affect them personally but anything to do with kids or war heroes and then collectively we will bang the drum. On the positive side at least we have a ground level where the ball does bounce!
Now the momentum has shifted and how! I have struggled to read the Guardian since the installation of the present government. Friends say "The Guardian!...are you a lefty?"....or words like that. I tend to have always been a Tory voter but only through certain principles and no political party is aligned strongly enough to my views. I think I would have voted for a coalition, co-operating is more difficult than oposing. Anyway, The Guardian, knocking Labour was fine when they were in power but now some of the thoughts peddled, in comment, seem decidedly unnecessary and certainly 'lefter' than I had previously noticed. I find myself ranting at Polly Toynbee as the arch inventor of over analysis and avoidance of common sense. However, listening to the Mediatalk podcast every Friday and particularly last Friday's blockbuster with the calm and assured Alan Rusbridger and the thinking man's crumpet Janine Gibson, you know that you are in intelligent and rational company. There is no doubt that they are the pinnacle of journalism in this country and agree with comment or not there appears no axe to grind just information and well presented arguement (not you PT).
I have bought the NOW twice in my life and have actively avoided handing them money but how you can take an iconic title and destroy it like that is staggering and surely not the way to win friends.
I like you Cameron but as chopper would say 'Harden the fck up', you don't need to copy Blair and Campbell and the door is open now to set a new process. If there is a lack of integrity in government and in the press then you need to cozy up to each other but if there is integrity in both camps you can prosper as both adversaries and friends. This might seem naive and the irony here is that the wider public, the last adopters of this cause, the readers of trashy journalism were those needed to bring this to a mighty head.
Oh and don't start me on the police because words can't describe........and the mobile phone companies are they just sharing data and numbers at will?
And a last thought, I would like to watch Alan Rusbridger and Janine Gibson on a new BBC breakfast, a less childish version than the current programme, more The Today programme but not as smug and combatative.....in fact Humphrys and Montague should be sent to run NOW. Oh and not forgetting young James Murdoch, he should be made to give his MacTaggart lecture again in public.
