Sunday 30 May 2010

Dead Tree Press Post Election Update

All change in the UK Media already. On Thursday the Daily Mail and General Trust announced a return to profit after a poor couple of years. Advertising has recovered a little, the expensive jaunt that was London Lite has been stopped and the website has lots of hits with its solid concentration on celebrity lite news. There were also 680 redundancies. Still, at least the future look stable.

Meanwhile the Guardian, so long the darling of the left, is in rather a lot of trouble. Not only are losses expected to be bad this year, but they backed the Liberal Democrats into the Government. Their repayment seems to be the Liberal acquiescing to the Tory plan of setting up an in-house Government jobs website. This will be catastrophic for the ad revenue of the Guardian as many of its ads are purely for Government work. And those that are not often publish Government advice and Quango self-justification adverts.

All in all, another victory for the Right wing over the Left. Shame in some ways, even as a right winger I know which paper I would rather read (if forced). Still, onward march market forces, at last.

5 comments:

Elby the Beserk said...

I was brought up (near Manchester) on the (then) Manchester Guardian. Read some of my first words at the breakfast table staring at the paper as my father read it.

Those days, it was an independent paper, with fine fine journalists. I lost faith in it early in the New Labour reich, sick of being lectured by the likes of the utterly ghastly Toynbee, and later, the priggish sanctimony of the hideous Moonbat. Last straw was their hitching their wagon to the New Labour train.

I stopped buying it. I read it online just to stir my ire and to poke fun and the idiots that populate CiF (Care in the community for the economically illiterate). Sadly, the Guardian deserves to die. CP Scott must be spinning in his grave to witness how debased it has become.

Goodbye Guardian. My mum loved you...

Old BE said...

Online public jobs site need not go online any time soon - the recruitment freeze will kill the Guardian on its own.

I think free-marketeers call that "creative destruction".

Bill Quango MP said...

As long as Charlie Brooker finds a home somewhere else I shan't miss it much.

Elby the Beserk said...

Is there not already an in-house Government jobs website? and this why it made the taxpayer's subsidy of the Guardian so vile.

CityUnslicker said...

Elby, oh yes, but it is not advertised!!