Comment is pointless
July 5th, 2006This [Guardian: Comment Is Free] site is like the temple of a new religion where followers shriek and howl themselves into a maniacal trance. The Guardian is now more a mad cult than a newspaper.
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The Grauniad is being treated like a mad cult by it’s posters who imagine that they are ‘contributing’, and not really being duped into believing that their opinion counts.
The Guardian itself is simply thrashing about trying to convince itself that it retains it’s importance, generating statistics of user interaction rates and the like to argue it’s case. Unfortunately for the Guardian, these users are naught but middle-brow sheep deluding themselves that they are more important than readers of the Sun. But the Guardian knows this.
And so do you. You’ve been told before.
But I can’t point you to where… ‘cos I don’t know how to use the internet!
July 5th, 2006 at 4:11 pm
You can always try to prove me wrong!
The people who bear the inexquisite corpse of ‘Comment is Free’ are exactly the sort of zombies who will not be swayed by any evidence that upsets their ingrained ideas. In all respects these people are neither subtle nor sensible. Nor ‘fashionable’ either!
These are the people who personify what is ‘wrong’ with the UK electorate, these are (largely) the readers who will stick with the Neu Labour mincing machine rather than wake up to the fact of its rapine nature. As long as Bliar can promise more tinkering with the NHS then everything else can whistle in the wind.
They would rather demonstrate and be ignored than use the tools of voting and taxation to make a difference – the most vociferous have an unshakeable belief in the Labour brand Neu, Lite, Old it makes no difference as long as the rose is red. And it is a thorn in the side of anyone having ‘fun’.
They wouldn’t even think if the headline became ‘All UK is Belmarsh’.
Incidentally:
The BBC has outflanked ‘printed media’ yet again – in terms of reprinting PR drivel anyway (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/5150572.stm if you must). I wonder why I now only go to the Beeb if I am explicitly pointed there.
July 6th, 2006 at 9:07 am
http://irdial.com/blogdial/?p=114
There we go.
Have you noticed many Grauniad articles and comment pieces now have these links at the bottom…
Digg this | Add it to Del.icio.us | See who is linking here
July 6th, 2006 at 12:14 pm
They are trying to leverage the traffic dumping power of sites like Digg to raise the profile of their pathetic operation. Their stories are rarely good enough to get Dugg however.
I just blasted this story onto the front page of Digg. The fact of the matter is that if you want to get Dugg, you have to write a story that is worthy of attention, and secondly, have users who even know what Digg is, which Guardian readers are less likely to be…and this is the problem, the Guardian online is still writing stories for guardian readers and not for everyone everywhere. They still believe that they have a core audience, or a homogenous demographic when in fact, the world is their oyster now, and they should completely drop their stye and focus for one that embraces “anything that is true and anything that is interesting”. The writing style is exclusive. They take PR and present it as news. All of this needs to change if they want to become the powerhouse that they want to be.