Will tradition be enough for the Observer?

I picked up the Observer yesterday as I usually do on a Sunday and as I rifled quickly through wondered how much longer I would be spending 2 pounds and whether it would be best simply to combine the issue with Saturday's Guardian.

Page 2 gave some hope with the preamble on its next relaunch at the weekend and John Mulholland tries to justify the changes in today's Media Guardian.

the paper's legacy and we will be trying to build on it next Sunday, when the Observer will be published as a four-section paper, plus our monthly Observer Food magazine. News, Sport, the Observer Magazine and our New Review section have all undergone significant changes.

he writes but I wonder whether this will be a final shot at a tradition dating back to 1791.

At least the 7 day Tv pages are returning though

The Observer wil be slimmed down

So the Observer is slimming.

Its much heralded announcement came as expected today.The Sunday will consist of four sections and three of the magazines are being axed with only the food monthly surviving.

The four supplements are news, sport, an expanded Review section and the Observer magazine with business and finance moving into the news section and travel moving to the magazine.

According to Guardian media

A core editorial staff will continue to work solely for the Observer. Other Observer journalists will be integrated into the editorial teams that work across the Sunday paper, GNM's other title, the Guardian, and its website network, guardian.co.uk, which includes MediaGuardian.co.uk.
GNM has reopened its voluntary redundancy scheme and the precise number of departures from different editorial departments has not yet been finalised, although the company has said there will be fewer staff at the end of the process.

D Day for the Observer

According to this from the Sunday Times

Staff at The Observer will learn their fate on Tuesday, when executives are expected to brief them on the future of the newspaper. The Scott Trust, the charity that owns The Observer’s publisher, Guardian Media Group, has decided to keep the title but in a drastically slimmed down form. Staff are expected to find out which sections of the paper will be dropped and how many dedicated editorial staff will be retained. Some of its monthly magazines are facing the chop.

We await further news

Newspaper sales continue to fall but some hope for some Sunday's in September

There were one or two interesting quirks in yesterday's ABC's.

Interestingly both the Observer and the Sunday Times saw their circulation's rise in Septemeber.Cynics may well put the former's rise down to talk of closure though GMG scotched speculation that the paper may close by confirming it will continue publishing and is to be revamped.

The News of the World also bucked the trend with its circulation up 0.26% month on month in September, to 3,129,162.

Sunday sales though continue to fall year on year and the Independent's saw a 2.72% drop in sales last month compared with August and a 14.29% decline year on year.

The Mail on Sunday also took a battering having posted the largest year-on-year fall of any title in the sector with a 10.11% drop in circulation to 2,012,741 copies.

Capital Ideas to buy the Observer?

Rumour's abound about the Observer which according to some sources is now about to be sold to investment group Capital Ideas.

Not a particually good idea thinks the Indy's Ian Burrell

Capital Ideas consultant Renwick Haddow has told City AM that its plans would involve cutting down the number of staff and turning the 'Obs' into a weekend review in the style of The Week, a publication that is not known for doing original journalism. What a sad fate that would be for a maverick paper with a fine tradition of investigations, breaking stories and publishing the criticism and analysis of writers as famous as George Orwell, Conor Cruise O'Brien and Clive James.

Observer's ex editor looks at the paper's fraught relationship with its big brother

The marriage of two like-minded papers seemed to be a union made in heaven, assuring a continued existence of the title.

writes Ex-editor of the Observer Jonathan Fenby in the Independent this morning.

He reveals the difficulty of the paper's relationship with the Guardian

causes for ill feeling between the daily and Sunday multiplied as the weeks and months went by. To meet the targets which the management of Guardian Group had presented to the trust, to justify the purchase, there were sharp editorial cuts, cushioned by Lonrho's generous redundancy terms.

and continues to spill the beans

When they were moved to the Farringdon Road building of the paper's new sibling to save money, Observer journalists found themselves shoe-horned into half the promised space, with some departments put into separate rooms down the street. As for the editor, goodbye to my predecessor's private shower room at the Battersea palace. The Guardian foreign desk told joint stringers that their first loyalty was to the daily.

Close the Observer-for once I will not be protesting

Am I bothered that GMG are considering closing the Observer?

Once I would have said yes,a rotten symptom of the current crisis in the media and how we must all fight to save the paper.

But actually I have fallen out of love with it and frankly its quality has gone down.

Often I will read less than half of it,its stories seem dry and a re churning of themes,its analysis apart from Andrew Rawnsley is lacking,its once lively foreign section has simply vanished.

Now it well may be that these are symptomatic of falling revenues but I wonder.

Since the newspaper industry made the leap to bumper Saturday editions,the Sunday market has been dying.Now Sundays are no longer the day of leisure spent perusing the papers.Frankly there is still a lot of Saturday's to read.

People have joined a face book group to stop the closure,there has been a campaign on twitter and yet I won't be joining them.

Maybe in this circumstance the natural course should take precedence

Observer's axing of the TV guide-a regrettable but necessary option?

I must admit that I was rather perturbed when the Observer decided to axe its weekly TV guide,a couple of weeks ago.My suspicion was the usual one to save money and my suspicions were correct as the Review's editor, John Mulholland, writes here

In short, there are no excuses. "This is not a decision we took lightly and it is a source of real regret to us,.
This was just one of the host of difficult decisions we have had to make in recent weeks. Newspapers and media groups are facing the most difficult trading conditions imaginable. Not only are we suffering from the catastrophic fallout from the credit crunch in terms of severely reduced advertising revenues but, additionally, our industry is undergoing structural change which is causing enormous disruption."

Call me old fashioned,and I know the arguments are that this information is now in numerous places.But it was good to have a paper guide to refer to and more importantly their recommendation ofter filled the Sky+ box

More on THAT book

Nick Davies' book has created quite a stir amongst journalists.

Mary Riddle's review in the Observer on Sunday,whilst agreeing with many of Nick's sentiments

Much of Davies's analysis is fair, meticulously researched and fascinating, if gloomy

takes issues with some of his attacks on the Observer and on the Mail

Davies is wrong, however, to suggest that the Mail's investigation of Stephen Lawrence's murder, a campaign of courage and commitment, was purely based on the rumour that Stephen's father had once done some work on Dacre's house

Moreover his assertion that Roger Alton lifted chunks of Alistair Campbell's memos to form the basis of the paper's pro war editorials has irked Riddle greatly


Stephen Glover in the Indy yesterday suggests that

Whatever we may think of the journalist Nick Davies, we should take his new book seriously.

And further tells us

Unsurprisingly, plans to run excerpts of Flat Earth News in The Guardian have been abandoned. The Guardian Media Group is behaving as though it would like the controversy to go away

Adrian Monck takes issue with the research that forms the basis of the book whereby

your average Fleet Street reporter now is filling three times as much space as he or she was 20 years ago. Turn that round, look at it from the reporter’s point of view: we only have one third of the time to do our job.

Yet Adrian suggests that this does not take account of technological improvements,freelance workers and the like.Her writes this on the issue of journalists reliance on PR.

The real filler in newspapers (and online) is wire copy. This is presented as something of a shock and Nick conflates this misleadingly with PR material (at least he does on the Today programme). Actually the only shock is that newspapers have hidden their reliance on the agencies for so long.

You can see the full report from Cardiff University HERE

http://www.mediawise.org.uk/files/uploaded/Quality%20and%20Independence%20of%20British%20Journalism.pdf

If only the Observer ..........

Today is the day that we should have had an election of course and no doubting the papers would have been telling us exactly who to vote for.

Perhaps one could have had a undue influence.According to political betting,the Observer's decision not to publish a poll on the 29th Sept showing the Tories trailing by 13 points

The report continues

But something happened at the Observer four days earlier to make them think twice about publishing it. Instead they commissioned a second survey from Ipsos-Mori, this time a phone poll, which showed a 7 point Labour lead - the same as a BPIX survey in the Mail on Sunday.
This had a remarkable affect on the mood in Blackpool. Somehow being seven points adrift felt manageable in a way that a 13% deficit would not have. And although you should only compare surveys from the same firm there was little doubt that the polls published that Sunday morning looked slightly less daunting as delegates enjoyed the Blackpool sunshine

So did the Observer's decision change the course of history.Of that, we shall never know

What the media commentators are saying

In the Observer Geoffrey Wheatcroft celebrates the 90th birthday of its former editor in Chief Conor Cruise O'Brien.

Next Saturday, Conor celebrates his 90th birthday. In the course of an amazing life, he spent several years at The Observer, as editor-in-chief and columnist. For this paper, Conor was a proud adornment. For him, the Observer years were merely part - though an enjoyable part, at least to begin with - of a life that took him from public service in Ireland to an African civil war to professorship in America to government ministry in Dublin. And with all of that he has published a shelf-full of books, a number of which ought to be read by anyone who cares about literature, politics or history.

The Observer itself makes the news in the Sindie followng the resignation of Roger Alton,Donald Trelford writing that This is no time to write off the 'Obs'

Last week's drama, while doubtless unsettling to Observer journalists, has to be seen in perspective. The paper's immediate demise was regularly predicted during my 18 years as editor, and it changed owners three times in that period. It is now on its fifth editor since I left in 1993, so another change in the hot seat – from Alton to his long-time deputy, John Mulholland – hardly constitutes a major crisis.

The Times carries the story that

Toilet humour creates stink for BBC boss

THE director-general of the BBC, Mark Thompson, has been accused of referring to Tessa Jowell, the former culture secretary, as “Mrs S*** For Brains”
The BBC was yesterday forced to issue a rebuttal after two senior television executives insisted they had heard Thompson use the phrase when he was head of Channel 4. Thompson’s supporters believe the story has been circulated by his enemies to undermine his position.
The remarks about Jowell, now Olympics minister, were uncovered by Maggie Brown, a journalist and author of a book on Channel 4.

Media comment in the Sunday papers

Ahead of this weeks BBC announcements,Andrew Murray Watson in the Independent looks ahead to the job cuts at the Beeb

On Wednesday, the BBC Trust, the governing body of the corporation, will sign off on plans to slash the BBC's budget – a move that could see up to 3,000 staffers receive their P45 in the post.

Where this will come from he has no doubts

it has been rumoured that 600 could go from BBC News.

And the new focus will mean

the bottom line is that the BBC will still be broadcasting the same number of hours of content, but making less original programming. This would seem to indicate that the corporation will be forced to delve into its archive drawer and show more repeats.
"Obviously with less programmes, we will put a stronger premium on quality of scheduling and what is chosen for which channel. That is the job the director-general is very handsomely paid for. What some of us term a repeat is an opportunity for another audience to see something for the first time."

But a source has told him that populist programmes such as strictly come dancing will remain

James Robinson at the Observer also looks to the week ahead at the Beeb

BBC staff are bracing themselves for heavy redundancies - and this time many are blaming the mess on their director .general

He adds that

Like David Cameron earlier this month, the 50-year-old Thompson will have to deliver the performance of his life to survive unscathed, particularly after sending an ill-advised email to staff last week claiming that the scale of the cuts may not be as bad as many fear. 'People were laughing out loud when they read it,' says one recipient.