Is the Guardian worse than it used to be?

but they still engage with the news and read articles

...is this true?

How young does Matt mean? There’s a huge amount of variation.

...is this true?

Yes -- but it's taking a while to dawn on the industry that the things <35 readers want are now fundamentally different to the things they're used to providing and that they'll have to change how they do what they do, not just the subjects they write about.

For example: in the early days of lockdown, across nearly all audience segments, the most sought-after thing people said they wanted was expert voices – they wanted to hear from the Faucis and Whittys of the world to know what they should do. For the mainstream 16-35 audience, however, the most sought-after thing was verification: they had already heard from a morass of voices, mostly online, and more often wanted to know if something they'd heard was actually true. Journalism as fact checking, not as conduit.

There's also the huge, bigger-than-generation-gap gulf over "objectivity". This is more complicated than "we hate the voice from nowhere stop both sides-ing" – it's about trust in the institutions and writers themselves.

It's more stark in the US than the UK, but younger audiences really don't trust the neutral these-are-the-facts framing at all. They assume everyone has a stance, so they are used to checking out the bona fides of everything they read, and working out from which angle a writer is coming before deciding how to appraise their work. This means house bylines or faux-objective writing make them feel as if the writer or publication is trying to conceal their true agenda. This is a problem for print media in particular, because the very approach that makes them seem trustworthy to readers in their 60s, undermines them with readers in their 20s.

The younger audiences also, to a slightly lesser degree, want to hear predominately from people who they think are broadly "like them". As they're predominately left, they'd expect to find those voices in the Guardian – and are then disappointed when they get there to find the wrong things being written about, in the wrong way. The BBC is in a similar fix.

(Interestingly, publications that use things like podcasts to humanise their writers have found that their writing is much more trusted as a result, even if it's still written in that older "balanced" style; this might be a way to square the circle. Laura K gets much more positive perceptions from Brexitcast listeners, for instance)

(The FT, btw, is a massive outlier and avoids these issues with younger audiences completely – it has the highest trust ratings of all the papers, and is trusted across virtually all other segments too. I suspect it's because people have a pretty clear idea where it's coming from, and because of the links with finance see it more as a factual information service like a newswire, even though it's really not)

That’s a really interesting post, thanks stet.

I feel almost guilty that I was only coming here to post Marina Hyde having a normal one last night:

What’s your real name, “Frank Owen’s Legendary Paintbrush”?? Man up and tell us, darlink https://t.co/EdK5spsh0h

— Marina Hyde (@MarinaHyde) July 17, 2020

stet, that's interesting but, um, do you have the data for that? :)
Have online publications even started to consistently link to original sources when writing about them? Most didn't a few years ago, I assume most still don't although it depends on the publication/stance.

For example, I hardly ever read the local news site because it's unreadable with ads and shite but they had a few figures about Covid cases in the area which I couldn't reconcile with govt published ones. I actually had to contact the writer of the piece to find out where they were from and why they were incorrect. They weren't at all transparent about what these numbers were, just presented as a list. Just a small example, but generally why I can only read articles about data (or scientific studies, or law, or comment on written text) as long as I can read the referenced text at source. NB I am slightly above age 35...

Do younger audiences really put the time in to check? Obviously great if they do, but what does this actually involve?

I don't think I can share it, but I'll ask because in theory my work could.

On the verification stuff, it's really clear <30s are much more active in checking out stories. Not in a rigourous way like you're describing, more "ok random WhatsApp fwd let's see if the BBC says the same thing". Marked difference compared to prevalent Boomer "I saw it on Facebook they wouldn't publish it if it wasn't true"

I'm guessing the FT avoids the trust issues because they are providing a lot of investor-type information and it has to be accurate reporting? Maybe a bit like the Economist you read around the good in-depth reporting but avoid the opinion (which was often incredibly boring reformist Bible).

I've always been as online as possible but this is interesting.

I can't be the only person on the left who ended up being So Very Online 2015-2019 in part because if I took a break from twitter and just read the news, I pretty quickly started getting actively misinformed on matters I cared about.

— Lafargue (@Lafargue) July 18, 2020

thanks stet, don't post anything you shouldn't, I don't know where you work and was interested in generally how you found this out!
also wonder what proportion of actual 16-35 yos the newspaper audience is that you describe.

by the vitally important voice of the left, marina hyde https://t.co/JnZVS0bSqt

— gart/barfield (@wurrance) July 18, 2020

a Marina Hyde joint from 2013, from before she was consistently hilarious and taking the conservative establishment down with her devastating wit every week and she wrote a horrible puff-piece on what a top bloke Farage is.

Booming post Stet.

I wouldn't quite put the FT and the Economist together here, the FT isn't quite Reuters but its reporting is as close to spin-free as you're going to get in a national newspaper. It also has a sustainable online revenue model and generally seems to be having a good crisis.

I don't if there are many readers who would rely on the Economist in the same way, I suppose its useful if you want to flaunt a surface knowledge of what's going on in the South China Sea and less so unless you want to be told that privatisation and deregulation is the only solution to, say, long waiting lists for allotments in England.

On trust - the Guardian is reasonably well trusted as far as UK news outlets go but that's not saying much. Trust is journalism in general is in the doldrums but trust in *individual journalists* can be very high.

will never understand why people pay money monthly just to read some psueds opinion on boring old politics brought to you by some shite broadsheet that died long ago. watching the news now i do wish i lived underground like were planned but i had to scrap

10/1 deems
20/1 treeship
50/1 nakhchivan

100/1 banky
150/1 krtek

500/1 Gaz Coombes

Thanks for the clarifications Matt.

Was just reading a piece, proposing a Momentum based media initiative.

https://newsocialist.org.uk/proposal-momentum-media-fund/

It talks about missed opportunities for Labour to have it's own media in the past, and touches on the question of trust.

xp
"In Supergrass we kept our political view for the pub table"

“fkknutter” otm

apart from the bit about scrapping living underground, ffs!

I guess I am surprised if the younger readership is holding up because plenty of ppl I know who were reading it at least online 5-10 years ago aren't any more, and my 20yo brother and his friends will follow links but aren't going to check the front page for news and have never really established any sort of newspaper habit (they don't really watch films either which seems more wild to me)

That's true but idea of checking a homepage for news is in decline across the industry - unless they have the app downloaded (which I think is a minority of slightly older users) audiences just don't consume online media like that any more. Traffic to the homepage is usually much lower than it is to other pages.

Audiences tend to arrive through other ways, mainly social media - it's one of the reason why the big tech providers, Facebook in particular, are both so powerful and resented. (The fact that Facebook and Google are also eating their advertising lunch several times over is adding injury to insult here).

Also readers will be engaging differently with the news when they're 30 to when they're 18-20, that's almost inevitable.

In general I agree that the idea of loyalty to any one news outlet is over but the Guardian itself has been one of the beneficiaries of more omnivorous reading habits. Whether that's commercially sustainable is a different question.

That Marina Hyde post by Calzino deserves more attention.

That's 2013. Hyde promoting NF in a 'he's just a laugh' way. She also explicitly (hyperbolically) says that she'd do anything to avoid having a drink with Ed Miliband.

It's disgusting. It's complicit - in the way that HIGNFY? is. It's shameful. And she has got away with it.

you can't cancel the Baroness, she's got friends in high places. it beggars belief that someone who prefers Farage to Ed Milli gets so many plaudits from liberals and left leaning social democrats (alright "melts" then!) for her oh so droll and hilarious takedowns of Tories. She is about as Tory as they fucking come really.

she was happy left-posturing when Blair and Brown were in power and attacking them from the left, but when Labour got a centre-left leader, like the Greens she shit the bed at the idea.

about half of these commemorate a fascist paramilitary organisation but cute graphics huh https://t.co/4jtuuVvNSr

— Owen Hatherley (@owenhatherley) July 20, 2020

Jesus Christ.

these are basically the same lads that worked at Treblinka, wtf are they thinking about?

Great bunch of Nazis.

Alexa, play Nokturnal Mortum and Drudkh!

I'm genuinely not sure whether they think this is fine or if they just don't have anyone on staff with even the slightest clue as to why it wouldn't be.

Genocide-imon cards - gotta catch 'em all!

I'd be absolutely amazed if Kadish Morris, who seems to be a good sort, would publish this knowing the context but...is there no process for internal review?

How did a project run by a guy whose main web presence seems to be a Facebook page with 176 followers get this to them in the first place?

tbf who would suspect that anti-Soviet propaganda from Eastern European might contain some fascist iconography?

scuse my spellchecker

Kaddish huh

Is life too fuckin weird sometimes or what

This doesn't look in any way dodgy at all... 😬 pic.twitter.com/Tk4f03UaxE

— ⚙️🌾Planned Economy Please 🇵🇸 (@jamtapot) July 20, 2020

They should get Jonathan Jones (or, as they call it, "The Model") to fact-check this kind of submission in future.

On a side note, the Victims Of Communism Foundation, in addition to counting millions of people who were never born but might have been had it not been for Stalin, is adding all COVID-19 deaths globally to its running total.

They're historic items - it wouldn't be odd to see them in a museum.

I don't really see why the Guardian shouldn't reproduce them, unless they're spinning it in a misleading way (which perhaps they are).

I can imagine a similar series of, say, IRA or UVF posters. Definitely significant historical documents, worth seeing. But shouldn't be shown by the Guardian without a lot of context? Maybe.

Funnily enough here's a directly comparable example!

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/gallery/2015/mar/04/belfast-murals-in-pictures

On a side note, the Victims Of Communism Foundation, in addition to counting millions of people who were never born but might have been had it not been for Stalin, is adding all COVID-19 deaths globally to its running total.

Japanese soldiers who invaded China, for sure. Not sure about Germans.

xp, Yes, the context is completely absent. It's presented simply as 'Ukrainian resistance'. The project is run by a guy who vocally supports the legacy of the OUN and takes the line that the Nazis weren't as bad as the Communists wrt Ukraine.

The IRA and UVF, iirc, have not actively participated in a genocide.

The 'this doesn't look in any way dodgy' image above is surely meant to represent Lenin himself right

/minor pedantry

Taking aside where it comes from for a moment the Ukraine stuff really needed a line or two of context below it. It's the first difference you notice between that and the Belfast link.

Do you think the Belfast link has enough 'context'?

I find it an interesting comparison; not really sure what the right conclusion is.

The importance of context in Ukraine shouldn't come as news to a paper that famously published a puff piece about women fighting on the frontline and had to go back to update it with a caption explaining why one of them was standing in front of a van with '1488' stenciled on the side.