Is it just me or has The Independent really gone downmarket in the last year or so? I used to buy the paper every day religiously as I preferred its tone and coverage to The Guardian, The Times or The Telegraph. However, I now find that I hardly ever buy it at all and if I do buy a paper I go straight to the Independent.
I have a few separate issues with the paper.
Firstly, I think the columnists are boring and increasingly repetitive. Yasmin Alibhai-Brown only ever seems to write about identity issues surrounding being both Muslim AND British, Janet Street-Porter tends to deal mainly with the bleeding obvious in a really unpleasant tone, Steve Richards spent the months prior to Brown's accession to Number 10 so far up Brown's arse he could taste whitening tooth-paste and now that Brown's premiership is falling apart, he devotes himself to attacking the Labour rebels in quite a half-hearted manner. Bruce Anderson is what Jon Stewart would call a 'Partisan Hack' as he puts the boot into the government without wit or insight and then turns on his own party and tries to steer the debate. Nor is he above partisan trolling.
The problem is that these columnists are all, in effect, rubbish bloggers. They're not proper journalists and so they don't go out and investigate theories and stories, they just soak up the media and use news items to air their talking points. Frankly, if all you're going to do is comment then you should do so with real insight. The kind of insight that comes from being a political insider, a scholar, a politician or some kind of expert. Being a semi-retired journalist who pumps out the same stuff day after day just does not cut it anymore. The gulf in complexity between The Indie and The Graun is vast.
Secondly, The Independent's coverage is incredibly shallow. Not only is their arts section a complete joke, but their coverage of foreign news is lazy and patchy. For example, the US elections are a major political event with repercussions that will shape the globe for years to come but there's hardly any US election coverage in the Indie. The odd story here and there but compared to The Guardian's excellent coverage it is a joke and looks incredibly amateurish.
Ths is doubly disappointing as the reason why I started reading The Indie was that, during my PhD, their coverage of the War and the US political situation was without a doubt better than that of any of the other major paper. Especially as The Guardian's response to the War was to get sucked into the anti-colonialism vs. anti-fascism civil war that ripped through the remains of the British Left. By contrast, The Independent these days seems to devote itself almost entirely to utterly fruitless speculation and navel-gazing over the future of Brown's tenure as Prime Minister. There is so little to actually go on and so little insight to be had that it has reached the point where its comparable to the treatment of the Maddie case by 24 Hour News Channels.
Thirdly, the paper seems to have been completely taken over by its lifestyle section. The Indie always used to do these 10 Best lists but at the moment it seems to be the only thing it actually puts out. If you look at the list of most read articles, you'll see it's almost completely made up of 'articles' like '10 Best Lingerie Sets' or '10 Best Video Games'. Today, for example, there is a glossy magazine called Love and Sex featuring such ground-breaking journalism as 10 Best Ways for a Woman to Impress a Man and 10 Best Ways For a Man to Impress a Woman. It also includes this piece by Esther Walker, which simply has no place in a newspaper. Note also the heterosexism, no room for men to impress men or women to impress women.
I can't read The Independent anymore. I get the impression that their response to the decline of newspapers has been to fire all of the actual reporters and become a purely reactive publication that keeps hitting 'reload' on the AP website until something interesting to write about comes along. Still, at least it has stopped going on about needless waste whilst including bird-watching posters that invariably went in the bin.
I have a few separate issues with the paper.
Firstly, I think the columnists are boring and increasingly repetitive. Yasmin Alibhai-Brown only ever seems to write about identity issues surrounding being both Muslim AND British, Janet Street-Porter tends to deal mainly with the bleeding obvious in a really unpleasant tone, Steve Richards spent the months prior to Brown's accession to Number 10 so far up Brown's arse he could taste whitening tooth-paste and now that Brown's premiership is falling apart, he devotes himself to attacking the Labour rebels in quite a half-hearted manner. Bruce Anderson is what Jon Stewart would call a 'Partisan Hack' as he puts the boot into the government without wit or insight and then turns on his own party and tries to steer the debate. Nor is he above partisan trolling.
The problem is that these columnists are all, in effect, rubbish bloggers. They're not proper journalists and so they don't go out and investigate theories and stories, they just soak up the media and use news items to air their talking points. Frankly, if all you're going to do is comment then you should do so with real insight. The kind of insight that comes from being a political insider, a scholar, a politician or some kind of expert. Being a semi-retired journalist who pumps out the same stuff day after day just does not cut it anymore. The gulf in complexity between The Indie and The Graun is vast.
Secondly, The Independent's coverage is incredibly shallow. Not only is their arts section a complete joke, but their coverage of foreign news is lazy and patchy. For example, the US elections are a major political event with repercussions that will shape the globe for years to come but there's hardly any US election coverage in the Indie. The odd story here and there but compared to The Guardian's excellent coverage it is a joke and looks incredibly amateurish.
Ths is doubly disappointing as the reason why I started reading The Indie was that, during my PhD, their coverage of the War and the US political situation was without a doubt better than that of any of the other major paper. Especially as The Guardian's response to the War was to get sucked into the anti-colonialism vs. anti-fascism civil war that ripped through the remains of the British Left. By contrast, The Independent these days seems to devote itself almost entirely to utterly fruitless speculation and navel-gazing over the future of Brown's tenure as Prime Minister. There is so little to actually go on and so little insight to be had that it has reached the point where its comparable to the treatment of the Maddie case by 24 Hour News Channels.
Thirdly, the paper seems to have been completely taken over by its lifestyle section. The Indie always used to do these 10 Best lists but at the moment it seems to be the only thing it actually puts out. If you look at the list of most read articles, you'll see it's almost completely made up of 'articles' like '10 Best Lingerie Sets' or '10 Best Video Games'. Today, for example, there is a glossy magazine called Love and Sex featuring such ground-breaking journalism as 10 Best Ways for a Woman to Impress a Man and 10 Best Ways For a Man to Impress a Woman. It also includes this piece by Esther Walker, which simply has no place in a newspaper. Note also the heterosexism, no room for men to impress men or women to impress women.
I can't read The Independent anymore. I get the impression that their response to the decline of newspapers has been to fire all of the actual reporters and become a purely reactive publication that keeps hitting 'reload' on the AP website until something interesting to write about comes along. Still, at least it has stopped going on about needless waste whilst including bird-watching posters that invariably went in the bin.
There has been a recent change of editor which could explain the change of direction (quality). I'll read the Independent on Fridays because of the Arts section but last Friday I didn't really bother with the main paper...
Posted by: gav (nextread.co.uk) | September 22, 2008 at 02:20 PM
Hi Gav :-)
As I said, I think their arts section is broadly rubbish. I used to rate their media section on mondays but it's been a while since I saw anything interesting in that.
I did find an article about Ailton's take-over and weirdly he seems to have taken the opposite tack to the one suggested. The article argued that the Indie is for people of more refined tastes... people who are non-tribal and who go their own way. However, since he has taken over, the paper has gone more and more for the mass market. It's essentially on a level footing with the Evening Standard in terms of quality.
Posted by: Jonathan M | September 22, 2008 at 03:04 PM
Can't comment on the Evening Standard as I've only seen that on my rare trip to London - though I was quoted in it once :)
Whatever happened to telling us the news and leaving comment to News 24?
I've just read in the guardian - online: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/sep/22/theindependent.rogeralton - that the cover price is going to be £1!! bugger that for a game of soldiers. You ain't getting what you pay for.
Posted by: gav (nextread.co.uk) | September 22, 2008 at 03:38 PM
I rarely buy papers but did during the Iraq war thanks to Fisk's superb articles. Some of the cover pieces were incredibly bold.
Unfortunately for the Indie, I rarely buy physical papers and went to the Guardian as soon as they put up paid barriers in front of their content.
Posted by: Shaun CG | September 22, 2008 at 06:44 PM