Stand Up for the Observer

This evening I attended the Stand up for the Observer event at the Friends Meeting House organised because, as you may well know, the Observer newspaper's future has been called into question. Not just, of course, hundreds of jobs are at risk but also one of the only left of center Sunday papers in this country (the other being the IoS which sadly can't afford to do actual news anymore).

The meeting was packed out with hundreds of well wishers, mainly plebs like me but also such luminaries as Barry Norman, John Humphreys and the bloke who played Dickens.

Hosted by David Mitchell the event was extremely well run and I highly recommend him to chair any such gathering in the future should you be considering him. I say this because the last time I saw him on TV he was playing a character who sold out a campaign to defend his newly redundant workmates, but obviously that's fiction not real. in reality he's an amusing Arthur Scargill.

A string of Observer stalwarts and union speakers made the case for the Observer, a paper which sells more papers now than they did nine years ago with 400,000 readers. The meeting heard from an NUJ (National Union of Journalists) speaker who'd been organising in Manchester against cuts from the very same newspaper group and she advised us not to assume that because the Observer was a liberal paper that somehow that meant the staff would automatically get a fair deal.

Indeed, although management have 'saved' the title the real battle will be in how many jobs are lost and at what cost to the quality of the journalism. In the long term the Observer will not remain viable if it is only the 'brand' that is saved, the journalists and the commitment to decent journalism needs to be there to make it worthwhile.

Don't get me wrong I'm not overjoyed with any of the Sunday papers in particular, but if the only left leaning Sunday paper that actually delivers news goes then the right's monopoly of the market is reinforced. It doesn't matter if Observer Woman is shit when we look at the big picture of the thing because we're unlikely to see any genuinely left-wing Sunday National spring up any time soon, so the Observer is the best we have - let's save it to improve it is what I'm saying I guess.

Losing the Observer would not just mean that the right's choking grip on the Sunday market is even stronger (and I don't care if *you* don't buy it, I do care that people will buy Sunday papers and the current readers will have to move right to keep feeding that habit if the Observer goes). It also means lost jobs and a lost space where the left can at least get their ideas aired to a wider audience.

If redundancies are announced the NUJ FOC told us there will be an automatic ballot on strike action, but the attacks may be more piece meal through natural wastage, letting the paper whither on the vine. That would be a blow against democracy, because we need a strong liberal press that does things like condemn the attacks on civil liberties in a credible properly researched way. I'm for a more informed electorate, so I'm for the Observer.

In the words of David Mitchell "stopping things getting worse is as good a cause as any" and when the battles ahead take place, which they surely will, I hope people will see past their differences with the Observer, if any, and give it their full support.