Is the Guardian worse than it used to be?

You'd think I'd like it when I describe it that way but no.

Yeah I mean the rent is probably not that much cheaper than the rest of the area but they're not going to be lumbered with a big lease or anything because the whole place is inherently short-term.

Again, even Shoreditch feels a weird location for them - kind of depressed former hipster zone

It's full of offices though, way more than Dalston or wherever.

The whole "we'll display everything under this hashtag" approach is such a rudimentary social media clanger though, unless the Graun were taking this all into account and just want the attention, which is possible.

― Matt DC, Thursday, 30 May 2013 11:22 (16 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

given that at times their online model seems to prize bad, misinformed articles which get hundreds of BTL comments picking them apart to good, closely argued ones which get a few dozen murmurs of approval, this wouldn't be terribly surprising

Yeah I wouldn't imagine them in Dalston, like Farringdon or whatever is surely their spiritual (central) home, but presumably way too expensive and probably far too much good competition.

All the best coffee in London seems to be between my place and Farringdon - two places on Leather Lane alone are easily top 10.

Yeah those Leather Lane places are great, but I doubt that 'best coffee in London' is really the Graun's core concern here.

I know what you mean - but even that is weird too. Like, what is their concern? A place for tourists to come to? That seems the most logical explanation.

I suppose it's general brand-building, of a kind that could potentially pay for itself.

Given that there's a bar / cafe in their own building, i'd have thought King's Cross might be a decent place to set it up. King's Place is about 90% there in terms of being a really good social / cultural space.

yeah it's quite an impressive building.

i mean, as offices go.

pics here

http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/a-big-day-out-atthe-guardian-data-driven-coffee-shop

the mind boggles

expert trolling by guardiancoffee

Oh wait, so #guardiancoffee tweets are shown on screen in this place? And it's already open? Right, igi now.

Thankin u mr vice man

Not sure Vice really has the moral high ground here given that they've run the fucking Old Blue Last as their house venue for the past however many years.

oh true. vice has the moral high ground in no situations. just posting that for the pics.

there is no moral high ground, only pageviews

to be fair, this got people clicking. it's not every newspaper that bothers to seek out stories that make people's right index finger move downwards by less than a centimetre.

Well Nathan Barley

do they have sky sports tho

http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/lostinshowbiz/2013/jun/06/team-tulisa-contostavlos-cocaine-arrest

^^standing and applauding

I wish she'd write stuff like that more often.

Who wrote it?

There was a column from a few years ago when she really laid into the editors of yr interchangeable celeb weeklies as well.

Ah, Marina Hyde. You can tell i don't read the Guardian online very often.

it is incredibly creepy that tabloids set someone up like this, and the police obv then have to act.

Marina Hyde is my hero.

that's pretty booming

There was a column from a few years ago when she really laid into the editors of yr interchangeable celeb weeklies as well.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/lostinshowbiz/2008/aug/01/celebmageditorspecial

PRISM and Verizon scoops showing that the Guardian is still a great investigative newspaper imo

no but a coffee shop tho lol

credit for those is apparently due to greenwald, not the guardian. xp

greenwald is a columnist (not journalist), is american, lives in the US, and often publishes his columns elsewhere at the same time as in the guardian, which started running them a year or so ago. until this he hadn't done any reporting for the paper.

also the prism thing was in the washington post

Correction: Greenwald lives in Brazil because of his partner.

ah ok.

in any case, the guardian is worse than it used to be.

no doubt, but Marina Hyde is bang on the money in this instance

The PRISM document appears to have been leaked simultaneously to Greenwald/The Guardian and the Washington Post at more or less the same time. Given the Guardian have been paying him and Rusbridger presumably knew what he was up to I think you can give them credit as well here, even if the investigation wasn't planned in an office in King's Cross.

They broke the Murdoch story as well and continued with it for months before it became massive news.

the murdoch story is certainly due credit.

the prism thing seems to be them non-exclusively publishing a deliberately leaked document one of their comment is free semi-freelance writers was chosen to be a recipient of, not investigative journalism.

I think they had to do a bit more than just publish the contents of the document but yeah, I agree it's not proper investigative journalism.

i am being ungenerous yes.

i think this being in the guardian doesn't so much reflect well on the guardian as very poorly on the nyt.

It's A Good Story

UK gathering secret intelligence via covert NSA operation

Never in doubt iirc

Not surprising at all. iirc they openly do what the US is currently being hauled over the coals about (keeping logs of all call / text details).

details are welcome, but yeah this has been legal and public knowledge since http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_of_Investigatory_Powers_Act_2000 unless i'm misunderstanding the story.

like max says, the guardian does deserve some respect for getting these greenwald stories into print

lmao i cant IMAGINE what the original draft of that greenwald piece looked like

― max, Thursday, June 6, 2013 12:24 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

greenwald is a columnist (not journalist), is american, lives in the US, and often publishes his columns elsewhere at the same time as in the guardian,

Does he? Where? He moved from Salon to the Guardian last year and I don't think his stuff gets legitimately republished anywhere else. Maybe the odd thing has been syndicated, I dunno.

greenwald is a columnist (not journalist),

He's not a reporter, but columnists are a subset of journalists.

Or subspecies, possibly

xpost The Guardian got the story first. Washington Post followed.

As to whether being the recipient of a leak counts as good journalism - yes, of course it does. Because to be the recipient of a leak as big as this you have to a) have spent years making excellent contacts b) spent years building trust that you will not betray those contacts c) spent years building trust that you will be able to deliver the best possible story for that leaked document. And you have to have editors astute enough to know who to hire who can do that stuff. It's not as if someone who had the stuff picked a name at random to send it to.

I do work for the Guardian, but this would hold true if it had been another paper that broke the story.