“Our ambition is to be the leading global liberal voice…”

I find this terrifying. US readers may not appreciate what an English paper understands by liberalism. For the Guardian, it entails an obssessive hatred of Israel with almost daily attacks in either stories or opinions. I wrote them suggesting that they just write “Israel est delenda” on their masthead and have done with it, but they did not get round to this yet.

Secondly, this is starting to spill over into hostility towards Jews as a whole. At the more educated levels of society, this translates into bitter and vile abuse; lower down, it is physical attacks – it’s true that one cannot pin all this down on the Guardian but it must bear some of the responsibility for creating an atmosphere potentially against the Jews.

The situation is worst in the educational sector – one where, I suspect, the paper is most read. I believe that my son will be unable to go to university because of his Jewish origin – by the time he is old enough, there will eb a de facto if not de jure ban. I am happy that he is a US citizen and able to come back to a society basically friendly to Jews. As I said, it is horrifying that the Guardian will be doing its best to change that too.

I have seen the damage that 30 years of relentless propaganda against Israel has done to that country (limited though, as is Britain’s current standing in the Middle East) and more seriously to the Jews of Britain. I certainly hope this does not happen in the US too.

On the first point about driving readers from print to online, I am not so sure. In my own blog yesterday I argued that the web has helped create a brand awareness which may be one of the factors helping the Guardian sales to do rather better than most UK newspapers. Without the web audience in the USA I doubt if they would be planning the print in five cities across the states. Sales may not be large but the print option goes alongside the web at least in the medium term.

As Steve Jobs quipped at the inaugural D: Conference: “People couldn’t type. We realized: Death would eventually take care of this.”

https://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/2006/06/13/newspapers-20-75-billion-online-business-model/

There used to be sentiment in the newsroom that we simply couldn’t put our exclusives, our scoops, on the Web before the paper hit porches the next morning. What if the competition, The Denver Post, rushed to cobble together a story they put in their paper the next mornng? Alas, lost scoop!

Um, no. You scoop ‘em on the Web, which is read around the world, they’ve been scooped good and proper. (The fact that the papers have been in a joint operating agreement since 2001 has helped; we compete for readers, but only journalistically, not financially. The more readers, the better for both papers and it makes no difference which paper they read.)

No doubt there are exceptions decided above my pay grade, but essentially breaking news goes up on the Web as soon as it is written and edited.

Back to blogging after a couple of week’s vacation in italy.