Another august institution falls…

So farewell, The Daily Sport. The 'newspaper' for those too lazy to go online for porn, and too illiterate even for The Star or The Sun. Famed for your front page 'nipple count' and even - in the distant past - viewed with affection for your famously bonkers made-up stories, such as World War Two Bomber Found On Moon, until the pornography took over.

And now you've gone bust. Tens of teenage boys mourn. Despicable as the Sport titles are, they do represent the kind of cheeky Carry On sniggering for which the British are famous.

How newspapers do science

This is a lovely satirical piece on how science is reported in newspapers - I'm impressed the Guardian, which is only slightly better than the others, published it. Here's a taste. Do follow the links at the bottom of the article. 

This is a news website article about a scientific paper

In the standfirst I will make a fairly obvious pun about the subject matter before posing an inane question I have no intention of really answering: is this an important scientific finding?

In this paragraph I will state the main claim that the research makes, making appropriate use of "scare quotes" to ensure that it's clear that I have no opinion about this research whatsoever.

In this paragraph I will briefly (because no paragraph should be more than one line) state which existing scientific ideas this new research "challenges".

If the research is about a potential cure, or a solution to a problem, this paragraph will describe how it will raise hopes for a group of sufferers or victims.

This paragraph elaborates on the claim, adding weasel-words like "the scientists say" to shift responsibility for establishing the likely truth or accuracy of the research findings on to absolutely anybody else but me, the journalist.

A great day for news media

Over the last couple of days, Rupert Murdoch's News International / News Corp has started to put its websites behind paywalls: The Times is already locked up, and The Sun and others will gradually follow.

This is magnificent news. These outlets are poisonous, distorted, propagandistic wells of bile. The less access people have to them, the better - and they won't pay because they're now used to reading individual stories on news aggregator sites, rather than devotedly sticking to one outlet. If only he owned the Daily Mail.

Even better - Sky Sports News is leaving Freeview. Thank heavens - it's the epitome of moving wallpaper. Calling it Sports News didn't make it news - endless titbits of inconsequential guff repeated endlessly, with whizzy graphics attempting to disguise the paucity of real news. Ebbsfleet Town's reserve goalkeeper has a sore knee. Sussex have let their assistant groundskeeper go. Some baseball player has played baseball.

The public sphere will benefit hugely from the clear air provided by the disappearance of this guff.

Great where?

The rest of the world agrees with my readers' boredom: the UK election doesn't merit a mention on the New York Times webpage (top story: Mine Rescue Continues As Owner Faces Questions), nor the Huffington Post's (iPad Users 5 BIGGEST Complaints).

The Irish Times has a short piece on the Lib Dem leader, well under notices of their crossword compiler's death and 'Giant Lizard Discovered in Philippines'. Le Monde says 'bof' (one line in the 'other news' column, preferring to focus on the uprising in Kyrgyzstan, Die Welt (The World!) has space for Whitney Houston's admission to a clinic but not for a UK election - the same goes for Corriere della Sera.

Move along, folks, there's nothing to see here.

Could be worse…

Industrial relations aren't brilliant here, and we don't see much of management, but at least we aren't the Washington Times, which has closed the management floor to staff, and has armed guards in the pressroom! At what point should those employees wonder about their working conditions.

'Type faster, or I'll blow your brains out, punk'.

It's all doom and gloom down at t'Guardian

People are losing their jobs elsewhere, even in the heart of the chattering classes. Yes, my favourite newspaper is shedding people and sections. Hopefully they'll be treated well, though Fleet Street has a saying about liberal papers treating their staff worse than reactionary ones.

The Guardian has declines recently - the supplements, such as Environment, have been reduced to allow more journalists to spend time on important stories about Amy Winehouse, The Wire, celebrity sport columns and whatever Tanya Gold thinks we should know about her on any particular day. Now they're ceasing to publish the Technology supplement - an innovative and (you'd think) essential part of a forward-looking newspaper. I'd drop the TV listings personally and cut the 'essential clothes under £3000' dross.

Over at the Observer, the decent magazines are going: Sport Monthly, Woman and Music. All that will be left is the Department for Supporting Illegal Wars Based on Falsified Evidence and (hopefully), Rawnsley and Mitchell who, let's face it, needs the work. I certainly won't miss Escape (the travel section), lacking a cat in need of litter material.

Does it matter? Newspapers are migrating to the web - and losing millions of pounds in doing so. Murdoch plans to put his papers' sites behind a pay wall, while others, like the Guardian rely on advertising (which is why they're going bust). I love the accessibility of the web versions - but I also love the flow, convenience and portability of the newspaper, the ability to tear bits out, write on them, pass them over to your friends, fashion them into sunhats…

Witticisms aside though, it is a bit worrying - loads of US newspapers have closed, and UK ones are struggling, despite having a much better readership. We need spiky, independent journalism. Can't we ban the Daily Mail instead, and forcibly transfer their readers? It would be like being sent on an involuntary and unpleasant foreign exchange holiday. They don't like our clothes (sandals), our food (muesli), our relaxed attitudes to sex, drugs and politics… but they'd be transformed after a few months - into nice people.

So farewell then, Christian Science Monitor

For all their faults, newspapers are essential to the public sphere. In between stories about Jade Goody, how tomatoes/whatever give/cure cancer and topless women, they provide an arena for debate, they inform us and they hold our lords and masters to account.

Britain has a healthy newspaper-reading public. Despite the slumps in circulation, they sell in the millions every day. Not so in the US, which has a narrowly corporate media industry and very few national papers (basically the troubled New York Times and USA Today - which is rubbish). So it's very depressing to read that the Christian Science Monitor is about to move to web-only publication (except for a weekly print digest which I suspect won't last long). Despite its dubious (contradictory?) name and nutty origins, it was a fine, independent publication which really cared about foreign affairs, unlike virtually every US outlet, and produced top quality journalism.

We're in trouble when the most powerful country in the world is populated by people who don't want to know what's going on elsewhere. When I was in Arkansas in 2001, the only world news I could find was a slot called 'The Global Minute', which lasted less than a minute and didn't quite manage to encapsulate the complexity of world affairs.

I'll miss the CSM, and I think that we're all poorer for the rash of US newspaper closures. An informed public is a more outward-looking, liberal public. Yes, the CSM will exist online, but it will become one more site in a billion, looking no more authoritative than any ranting git with some web skills. Furthermore, the web is great at pinpointing individual bits you decide to search for: a newspaper is a great expanse of paper you can browse through, while drinking tea and munching toast. You can rip bits out, circle things, wave it madly at whomsoever has the misfortune to be around you. Newspapers ROCK!

Happy birthday, grandma!

I'm away for my grandmother's 96th birthday party - she really is immortal, which hopefully means that I'll live long enough to bore your grandchildren too. As it's a family occasion, we're all sitting in separate rooms, reading newspapers (siblings apart - illiterates all). I've just read the Irish Times, and it's a real pleasure. It's still a massive expanse of newspaper, still running pages of close-type small ads, and clearly limited in its global reporting (lots of wire-service pieces), but it's beautifully written. 

It's an odd paper. Formerly the voice of the bitter Ascendancy which took several decades to come to terms with letting the culchies run the country, it's become a sophisticated, largely liberal paper which takes a cool, disinterested (is this the character of Church of Ireland Protestants?), rather despairing long view of the vagaries of Irish politics and governance - a bit like the Guardian but without the slightly desperate attempt to be cool, probably because it's the paper of record with no serious competition. There's something delightfully old-school about a paper in which letters start with 'Madam' (editor Geraldine Kennedy) and end with 'a chara etc.' The paper seems suffused with the barely suppressed notion that, had it been consulted, the country wouldn't be in its current economic, political and moral turmoil - and it's probably right.

None of this applies, of course, to the Saturday supplements. Like the Guardian and all the others, they're obsessed with something called 'lifestyle', which seems to consist of consuming vast quantities of food while wearing expensive but ephemeral clothes. I hoped that, with a recession, this rubbish would fade away, but apparently not: the Guardian featured a man's shirt for £850 yesterday. I know that I'm a penny-pinching git, but this seems excessive. I can see the point of paying £5000 for bespoke suit that will last for an entire lifetime, but that much for something which will seem unwearably outdated in a few months' time just makes me incandescent with impotent rage. 

The Irish Independent is a bigger seller, but that rag is an hysterical, reactionary turd of a publication - much more like the Mail than its sister paper in the UK. I rather like the Examiner too - formerly the Cork Examiner, making a play for national status. Unfortunately, however, the British tabloids and mid-markets are muscling in on the market by adding 'Irish' to the masthead and sharpening their most stridently unpleasant views even further: they seem to believe that the Irish are even more insular and racist than their home readership. Say it ain't so!

I browse through other papers too: Libération, L'humanité and Le Monde sometimes, and struggle through a few in languages I barely recognise - good for the soul and brings a new perspective. 

Miss Piggy

I'm trying to avoid any porcine-related double-entendres about the Great Irish Pig Scandal, because my sister is immortalised in the world's worst newspaper (actually, I can confidently make that the worlds' worst newspaper - even given the mathematical calculation that there must be several billion inhabited planets out there, surely none is so unfortunate as to have the Daily Mail), gazing hungrily at the empty shelves of an Irish supermarket. The Mail loves these scares - they've of course managed to reduce the complex interaction of organic chemistry to 'cancer causing dioxins' (no hyphens for them) and only just managed to resist tying it to house prices. If the Mail's shallow and offensive approach to science makes you sicker than a hamburger-scoffing Irishman, head over to Bad Science for the antidote.

Still, she seems to be wearing most of an Argentine cattle ranch, so the BSE should make up for the absence of swill dioxins.

Update: The 'Irish' version doesn't even have a website which isn't very impressive, and none of the comment sections are ever written for the Hibernian audience (as Roy Greenslade points out)

The honourable tradition of British tabloids

Most of the newspapers, as you'd expect, are running with the US elections on the front page, though the Express concentrates on the assassination risk, the party-poopers.

Other papers (Daily Star and Daily Sport) however, aren't so impressed. The headline of the Sport (sorry, can't get a bigger image) announces 'Barack and Corrie Rosie, An Apology' - and goes on to promise that there won't be any more political coverage (or much coverage at all).