Facebook, what time is it?

A couple of recent items suggest to me that the Guardian really is in trouble, has no idea what to do about online, is wasting time trying to put a dent in Facebook.

Tuesday 13th , front page of G2 apparently Facebook has had a terrible year. Readers should delete their account at once. Various scandals, fake news etc.

Thursday 15th , "Google and Facebook will take more than 70% of all money spent on display advertising online in Britain by 2020" report by OC&C Strategy Consultants.

This is the real issue surely. Guardian in print seems to be full of scare stories, almost as many as when the web started to get attention. Almost nothing on what the Guardian offers online or what the plan is.

They do not seem to have realised why social media works. The web is two way, readers can be writers. I recently visited King's Cross and found the Midlands Shed is now a Waitrose. Not news, happened months ago. So the plan for a campus has been folded. This may have been the high point of the celeb option. Selling courses in lecture format is not an online sort of thing.

I now doubt if they will change. Welcome of comments? not very likely. Open discussion on what happened with Guardian Unlimited Talk? This will probably have to wait till after the next shock.

So I think a 50% chance of the print version closing Monday to Friday during 2017 is sounding quite a reasonable guess.

( continues re Education aka Tuesday on Hello Spiders blog )

immigration blind spots

Guardian seems very determined not to report Corbyn and colleagues. I watched some Sunday TV and notice what gets reported in print on a Monday. Mostly Boris.

Nothing about Corbyn in Europe that I can find.

The columnists, Matthew d'Ancona again on Boris, as a potential champion for positive views on immigration.

But what is lacking in mainstream politics is not opposition to immigration, but a sufficiency of voices willing to make the case for it. In this respect, Sir Oliver Letwin was quite right last week to tell the Times that the main parties have “made a terrible mistake” in failing to argue, with commitment and resolve, that “properly controlled migration enriches the country in every sense”.

No mention here for Dianne Abbott or Jeremy Corbyn. Is it Guardian policy to under mention them? it is getting more strange every day. To use a sports metaphor from Larry Elliott it is like reading a report on a cycle race where one team seems to have vanished.