#BoycottTheGuardian

[Paul Calf]

This sums up everything wrong with the Guardian's non-news stuff;
https://www.theguardian.com/food/2018/aug/18/four-favourite-pizza-recipes

Four pizza recipes, only one with any meat on, one that you have to start preparing the day before, two requiring a pizza stone, none with less than 12 ingredients, and all look fairly horrible. The same sort of thing is replicated across the whole section, the kind of lifestyle they apparently want to promote seems to require a great amount of time, effort and shopping to achieve something mediocre to plain bad.

Jesus Christ. What the fuck is this?



Any cunt calling that pizza should be shot in the genitals. And kale? quinoa? What's wrong with people? Can't we have food that looks and tastes nice as well as social responsibility?

[buttgammon]

Whereas my disdain for most of the British press is based on its obvious shitness, bigotry and lies, my problem with the Guardian is that I expect better than the level of middle-class, middlebrow tedium, political ennui and tedious navel-gazing we get from it these days.

Also, the very mention of Stuart Heritage has made my skin crawl. Probably the worst writer in any genre I have ever read anything by.

[Cuellar]

Jay Rayner can eff off an all.

Some review of a coffee shop in which he claims to have asked the barista "Do you even know what espresso means?" cos it took a while for him to be served.

Imagine actually saying that to someone working in a cafe.

[king_tubby]

Oh, I like old Jay. He looks like a D'Artagnan who has let himself go.

[pancreas]

Jesus Christ. What the fuck is this?



Any cunt calling that pizza should be shot in the genitals. And kale? quinoa? What's wrong with people? Can't we have food that looks and tastes nice as well as social responsibility?

Paul Calf is right! Shoot them in the genitals!

I mean, that dough has clearly not been properly proved and/or kneaded. It looks like a biscuit.

[Paul Calf]

Whereas my disdain for most of the British press is based on its obvious shitness, bigotry and lies, my problem with the Guardian is that I expect better than the level of middle-class, middlebrow tedium, political ennui and tedious navel-gazing we get from it these days.

Also, the very mention of Stuart Heritage has made my skin crawl. Probably the worst writer in any genre I have ever read anything by.

*cough*

[Sebastian Cobb]

This sums up everything wrong with the Guardian's non-news stuff;
https://www.theguardian.com/food/2018/aug/18/four-favourite-pizza-recipes

Four pizza recipes, only one with any meat on, one that you have to start preparing the day before, two requiring a pizza stone, none with less than 12 ingredients, and all look fairly horrible. The same sort of thing is replicated across the whole section, the kind of lifestyle they apparently want to promote seems to require a great amount of time, effort and shopping to achieve something mediocre to plain bad.

My favourite one was how to make your own baked beans. Not arsed mate, heinz.

[Sebastian Cobb]

Jesus Christ. What the fuck is this?



Any cunt calling that pizza should be shot in the genitals. And kale? quinoa? What's wrong with people? Can't we have food that looks and tastes nice as well as social responsibility?

Kale and quinoa are just gentrified cabbage and couscous for wankers.

[Icehaven]

It looks like a biscuit.

Appropriately enough, one of the others looks like a giant Jacob's cracker;

[pancreas]

Good God. If Gecko made me that monstrosity I'd throw it at the wall. Then I'd make him patch up the hole it would have left.

[yesitsme]

I like the Guardian's sport pages, I quite like their TV page, G2 could be ok sometimes.

If you read it from back to front it's ok, you find out that Corbyn is a Jew lover.

[thraxx]

Appropriately enough, one of the others looks like a giant Jacob's cracker;

This is not a pizza.  It's surely a flammenkuche.

[Kelvin]

Jesus Christ. What the fuck is this?

A tribute to Goatse?

[pancreas]

This is not a pizza.  It's surely a flammenkuche.

It is not a flammekuche either—what it is is a disgrace.

[BlodwynPig]

Snowden... WikiLeaks... Windrush... Panama Papers...

Any of those had a long term impact rather than transient outcry and bedding down of even more repulsive behaviour?

[Cuellar]

Any of those had a long term impact rather than transient outcry and bedding down of even more repulsive behaviour?

I don't know if you can blame the Guardian for the rest of society not being outraged enough to do anything about it.

[BlodwynPig]

Whereas my disdain for most of the British press is based on its obvious shitness, bigotry and lies, my problem with the Guardian is that I expect better than the level of middle-class, middlebrow tedium, political ennui and tedious navel-gazing we get from it these days.

Also, the very mention of Stuart Heritage has made my skin crawl. Probably the worst writer in any genre I have ever read anything by.

I thought we had all agreed it's "naval" gazing

[BlodwynPig]

I don't know if you can blame the Guardian for the rest of society not being outraged enough to do anything about it.

Im not, but they're watergate chasing journos are not principled imho

[BlodwynPig]

I like the Guardian's sport pages, I quite like their TV page, G2 could be ok sometimes.

If you read it from back to front it's ok, you find out that Corbyn is a Jew lover.

Perhaps if you are stuck in the 90s

[Sebastian Cobb]

Pizza is deffo the latest middle class revival isn't it. I know several folks spunking cash on outdoor pizza ovens.

Pizza's overrated imo, certainly not worth single use cooking equipment.

[Twed]

Rich North London liberals making disgusting pizza and shoving it in your face is a pretty good analogy for their politics in general.

[kngen]

Did we ever work out where the GMG/Scott Trust had stashed its offshore millions? Worth investigating I reckon. I bet it is somewhere dodgy.

Tbh, I truly believe it's been frittered away with some quite breathtakingly stupid decisions.

Moving to the Berliner format and the vast amount of money that cost to bring presses over from Germany, instead of just becoming a tabloid, which would have involved moving some wooden blocks about on the presses (the only iota of respect I have for Rupert Murdoch is that, when he wanted to turn The Sun into a tabloid, and was told it couldn't be done, he was enough of a newspaper man to clamber on top of the presses and find the blocks himself, wrapped in cloth and unused for decades. It ends there, though, of course). This involved a massive redesign, creation of bespoke templates, training, none of which come cheap.

'Integration' - where the print and digital teams were combined, which meant everyone had to learn everyone else's job. Massive amounts of training, bespoke versions of InDesign that dovetailed with Workflow, the Graun's own CMS that they had built from scratch. On-call experts for the older hacks who didn't quite get it.

A much-heralded move to become digital-first company, meaning print was no longer a priority (even though 90% of the revenue came from there), where paying customers were told 'If you'd like to read a longer version of this article, log on to www ....' ie 'You could have had more, and for nothing, you fucking dinosaur'. I'm pretty sure they hadn't made the shift to theguardian.com by this point, and were still theguardian.co.uk - which is important, as US advertisers tend to avoid anything that isn't .com - and the Graun was getting similar online ad revenues as the HuffPost UK at the time - yep, not even the American one: the UK site which employed about four people.

Another knock-on effect of the digital-first move was the first round of voluntary redundancies to clear out the deadwood, offering quite eye-watering amounts of money for people to leave the company, a scheme which was run by HR rather than section eds, who allowed a swathe of big-name correspondents and columnists to walk out of the building with a year's salary, at least, thanks to hefty tax-free sweetener on top of already generous terms. This left the editors scrambling to get them back in on rather onerous freelance terms before they were snatched up by the opposition, and a lot of tax and contractual law was circumvented or ignored to keep them onboard, as their redundancy agreements stipulated they couldn't work for GNM for 12 months. I'm sure HMRC might have poked their noses around in some of those deals and may have had to be paid off.

A second round of redundancies with even better terms than the first where HR - told under no uncertain terms to let the crown jewels of the writing staff to cash in – targeted folk like me, with a print background, because we were the old guard and not part of the new digital revolution. Except I could do both jobs because I'd been paying attention, whereas the digital production teams were waaay behind in grasping the intricacies of not just page design, but hard-and-fast daily deadlines, staggered print runs and the slowly debilitating stress that comes with the fact that, once you make a mistake, you can't just go in and change it later. I was offered 13 months salary to walk out the door, so sat on my arse getting good at Fifa then, a year to the day later, I walked back in as a freelance, and did exactly the same job as I had before. My story is far from unusual.

'Disintegration' - they knew they couldn't call the roll back of 'integration' this, but that's what we called it (can't actually remember the proper term, such was its flimsiness. Yep, integration hadn't really worked out, not least because all the digital staff were being asked to look after the print version, too - which, if you'll remember, is the only bit of the paper that made money – and so 'siloes' of experts in their specific fields were to be created so as to avoid gaps in production experience. It should be said that all of those grand gestures were arrived at after months of high-level consultations, meetings and working groups, none of which you would ever refer to as being 'cheap'.

Moving to tabloid after only 12 years of the Berliner - and all the costs such a redesign would incur, just as it had a decade prior.

Guardian Australia - just broke even last year

Guardian America - shows no sign of even coming close.

The drawing up of plans, including exploratory committees and all the other stuff that comes with it, for the Guardian Community Center to be built on land across from Kings Place - then scrapping the idea and announcing a raft of compulsory redundancies instead. Hmm ...

The Weekend Guardian - costs more to produce than the cover price. The Blue Monday of newspapers.

Finally having to pay for Kings Place - it was rent-free for the first five years, and now it is not. The plan was for the websites to be self-sufficient by the time the landlord came around looking for money. Has not happened, and it's now been added to the slow burn of AutoTrader and Farringdon cash that allowed GNM to pay for all this craziness over the years. Perhaps now, the landlords will fix the problems with the constantly blocked toilets, the static electric shocks and the air conditioning that only comes on when it's warmer outside than it is inside (which meant all the servers went down on a particularly hot day a couple of years ago, meaning the Guardian was in danger of not bringing out a paper for the first time since WWII - but never mind, they're digital-first, don't you know!)

Steve Bell - 2nd highest paid person at the Guardian behind Rusbridger when he was editor. He may even be on more than Kath Viner. I loved If... back in the day, but FUCKING HELL!

It all adds up ...

[king_tubby]

That's great stuff, kngen, thanks. Mind if I nick it to post somewhere else?

Steve Bell - 2nd highest paid person at the Guardian behind Rusbridger when he was editor.

WHAT IN THE FUCK??????

[poodlefaker]

Rich North London liberals making disgusting pizza and shoving it in your face is a pretty good analogy for their politics in general.

"If you want a vision of the future, imagine a disgusting pizza being shoved in the human face - forever"

[pancreas]

Yes, thank you for that kngen.

A nice reminder that you can pull up any paving slab and find utter incompetence scuttling about underneath.

[kngen]

That's great stuff, kngen, thanks. Mind if I nick it to post somewhere else?

WHAT IN THE FUCK??????

if you can take out the stuff where I reference myself, then sure. I still quite like to draw a wage from them now and then

[king_tubby]

if you can take out the stuff where I reference myself, then sure. I still quite like to draw a wage from them now and then

Thanks, will do.

[Isnt Anything]

Every time I see the acronym 'BTL' I think for a moment that it's some new fascist political party.

me too

[Ferris]

"If you want a vision of the future, imagine a disgusting pizza being shoved in the human face - forever"

Fantastic

[Thomas]

i like it when stewart lee does a article sometimes