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.

The Daily Fail - again

The Daily Mail (remember, it supported Hitler, Mussolini and the British Union of Fascists) play another blinder: it found an NHS doctor who earned £380,000 in a year, and it's horrified.

One small problem. This doctor didn't earn that much at all. When the NHS was founded in 1948, the doctors hated it, and so deals were struck. Aneurin Bevan said he'd persuaded them to accept the NHS by 'stuffing their mouths with gold'. The General Practitioners, you may be surprised to learn, aren't salaried NHS staff. Instead, they own their businesses, which they don't mention very often.

So - this £380,000 per year doctor doesn't 'earn' it at all. He receives it, and uses some of it to pay secretaries, rent, nurses, bills, etc. etc. I'm sure he isn't living on beans, but equally, he isn't taking home the same as a lawyer, to draw an appropriate parallel.

Now, how much does the editor of the Daily Mail get for pouring out a daily spume of racism, hatred and inaccuracy? Well, last year it was £1.6m: rather more than four of this doctor's sum and twice the BBC Director-General's salary. It's also over ten times the Prime Minister's pay. Has Dacre saved many lives recently?

Meanwhile, speculation is rife that The Observer might be closed, as the Guardian Media Group is losing lots of money. The Guardian bought the Observer a few years ago, and it looked like a decent fit, as the Observer was a decent liberal paper which had been treated appallingly by some very shady owners. It hasn't worked: although it looks very good, the Observer was drifted further and further to the right, while also becoming quite boring, with some exceptions such as Andrew Rawnsley. I hoped it would become a Sunday version of the Guardian under a different name, but that hasn't happened.

Sunday newspapers are difficult, especially now that Saturday ones are so huge. They used to be run completely separately from the weekdays, and had nice long deadlines so that substantial journalism could be conducted (the model was the Sunday Times and its Insight team before Murdoch ruined it) - now they're acres of fashion and navel-gazing. I'll miss the Observer because it's the best of a bad bunch, but not as much as I might.

Idle thoughts of an idle fellow

I should be working, but really I'm just waiting for my dinner to cook. I'm having free-range rare breed ham hock with vegetables, casseroled in dry cider. Hence I've had the first glass of cider in over a decade - bearable, though I'm not sure why you'd want to drink it rather than cook with it.

Anyway, I thought I'd direct you to feministing.com, Jessica Valenti's fun, furious and feminist blog (not just for women). I've read it on and off for a while, but an interview with her in today's Observer reminded me to recommend her.

Oh dear - wildlife show on 2 just said, very solemnly, 'albatross chicks are sitting ducks'.

And now the voice-over has claimed that the Easter Island statues were built because the islanders 'had time on their hands'. So much for the 'inform' and 'educate' bit of the BBC's mission.

Dignity is all

I love this, from the Observer's 'Said and Done' feature, especially the last two sentences:

Adriano's ex-girlfriend Joana Machado says the striker's high-profile romps with Rio porn stars Strawberry Woman and Caviar Woman are "sad". "When we were together in Milan he was a very jealous guy, very twitchy. Now we're apart, he despairs." Machado says she'll have a tattoo of his name removed from under her breast before resuming a career for Playboy Brazil. "Dignity matters to my family."

And the prize for consistency goes to:

…who tells The Observer that women politicians shouldn't be judged by their looks.

Caroline Flint, the minister for Europe, who is interviewed in today's Observer Woman, says media attention on her looks is insulting

She's absolutely right. Even better, she utters these timeless truths (in the news section teaser for the interview) across the space of several pages of the Observer Woman, while posing in a range of beautiful, revealing dresses while sporting the hair and maquillage of a Fifties femme fatale.

Needless to say, this softest of soft interviews (does she have leadership ambitions) doesn't find space to point out that she is the hardest, most elitist of the Blairite clique. You couldn't switch on the TV in the late nineties without seeing her advocating benefit cuts for the very poorest or some other mean-spirited, arrogant attack on the underclass, all delivered with a straight face as she claimed that sating the bitterness of the Daily Mail was socialism in action. Who cares that she's damaged the lives of women in this country (never mind the Iraqi victims of the war she loved), when she looks stunning in pastel silk?

She's hard, selfish, determined and utterly soulless - she'll go far. Still, policy is so last century - it's how she looks in a frock that seems to matter, which is an odd stance for a liberal newspaper's women's magazine to take, but there you go - we've been down the post-ideological rabbithole for a long time now.

Everyday is like Sunday…

I've popped home to see the aged parents for a day or so - I've got a taste for greenery now, and I couldn't abide being in Wolves while it's packed with triumphalist Wanderer's fans. Though it was really sweet to hear my boss and a student discussing their signing potential and premiership plans as though it was a proper grown-up football team. Still, it means that the mighty Stoke is still assured of an easy 6 points from West Mids teams despite West Brom's sad demotion. 

Today the spot list includes a gloriously unconcerned fox and two ostriches. Yes, there are ostriches living in Wolverhampton - in the yard of a pet shop near the railway viaduct. I wouldn't have seen them if I'd taken the train, but because it's a holiday weekend, we were packed into a coach which gave me the perfect vantage point to see these poor animals. 

I see the Observer's front page story is 'Key Minister savages PM over 'lamentable' failures'. As it's journalism, you have to overlook the two inaccuracies in 7 words - Hazel Blears isn't a key minister (the headline is an attempt to con people into buying the paper) and she doesn't 'savage' Brown, rather notes that some strategies haven't worked. 

Most astonishing of all, however, is the sub headline: 'We must appear more human - Blears'. Now, I've met Hazel Blears twice. The first time, she exuded all the warmth of a komodo dragon. The second time, the only connection between organic life and her was the komodo-like poison dripping from her lips (I say this as a Party member). You could easily find more empathy in your average traffic light than from Hazel. It's hard to describe how inhuman her little black button eyes are. Perhaps the closest I can get to summarising her is to say that she's the only person I've ever met who seems more real on television than in the flesh. If she zipped her head open like that Dr. Who episode, I wouldn't be at all surprised. She's classic New Labour, so obsessed with purging the few remaining socialists in the party by promoting more and more rightwing ideas that she has no vision left at all - she's HAL, running forever with no discernible purpose other than to betray her comrades. The only human character she reminds me of is Dolores Umbridge from one of the Harry Potter books - a threatening sweet smile which only accentuates the horror. 

There, that feels better.