News emerged at the weekend that Guardian Media Group is said to be discussing the future of The Observer – one of the oldest newspapers in the world.
One idea seems to be to turn it into a weekly news magazine – I assume in the style of Time, Newsweek or The Economist.
That’d be a great shame. But The Observer really does need to do something. As a regular reader (and purchaser) of the paper, it has noticeably got worse over recent weeks. The TV section disappeared and has been folded into the back of the Review section. I’m guessing this uses up Review pagination too. The Business and Media section now has little to no media coverage. Cash was folded into that section some time ago.
I’ve never been a big fan of newspaper magazines – why do they all carry expensively photographed fashion sections? The Observer Magazine has been relaunched more times than I can count, but it doesn’t carry any columnist I find remotely interesting. Worse than that, it still carries horoscopes – something that should never be carried in a serious newspaper. I chuck out the magazine unread far too frequently.
(It must be said that the same could be said of The Guardian’s Saturday magazine, but there is occassionally a good issue, like this weekend’s short story edition).
The Sport monthly is very good, and although it doesn’t interest me, so is the Food supplement.
But Women doesn’t interest me and is genuinely awful in conceit.
The real problem lies in the main paper. Too many columns full of fluff. I don’t care about Jude Law, and don’t need to read a columnists writing about not-caring about Jude Law. If I wanted to read Heat or OK, I’d buy those magazines. They’d do a better job.
Serious commentators like Will Hutton, Nic Cohen and the excellent Henry Porter are good. David Mitchell is a nice addition. But ditch the rest. Give me long investigative and interesting pieces of news coverage.
And if you can’t do that, give me more foreign coverage. I’m really not sure why it’s relegated to the back of the main section.
Oh and please change your TV reviewer… Just about anybody would be better. At least there’s still Philip French.
It’s always interesting to read comments on Media Guardian in places like Roy Greenslade’s blog. There’s obviously still a lot of hostility from people upset when Roger Alton was replaced – but his editorial reign saw many of the issues that are still there.
My problem is that if The Observer stopped Sunday publication, I really don’t know what other paper I could read. The Independent on Sunday is a poor relation with little value to it given the cover price. The Sunday Times just annoys me. The Mail on Sunday disgusts me. The Sunday Telegraph feels like something I shouldn’t be able to read for at least twenty years.
I fear that I would actually stop reading a Sunday newspaper.