Joanne the Coach

Turn The Other Cheek at the Edinburgh TV Festival

You've got just over a week to go to secure the Early Bird discount for the MediaGuardian Edinburgh International Television Festival.  For several hundred of your English pounds you too can enjoy a weekend of top quality TV Geek workshops.

Not least of which is a version of How To Look Good Naked, featuring the cream of the TV industry.

Hang on - naked TV Executives?  Isn't that something most people would pay good money to avoid?  Surely there are enough TV arseholes around anyway, without encouraging any more.

Brighton Rocks (Especially if You're a Guardian Reader)

I like The Guardian a lot, although sometimes it baffles me.

Current bafflement centres around the paper's new-found obsession with all things Brighton.  It's like a martian who's just landed on the pier, had a fantabulosa time, and wants to tell all their mates across the galaxies.  Repeatedly.

So last Saturday, Guardian readers enjoyed a special inset containing lovely photos of Brighton by Martin Parr.  On Sunday, The Observer (AKA The Guardian's louche uncle) gifted us with an aerial map of 1970's Brighton.  As Roy Greenslade says, what was the point of that?  I mean, it was nice for those of us who could pick out our houses, but what was the point for readers beyond the M25?

And next Saturday, The Guardian is offering - well, whoda thunk? - a 100 year old Ordnance Survey map of Brighton.  (All the dads in Brighton simultaneously punch the air and say Yesssss!  Could start a tidal wave)

I love Brighton, it's a great place to live.  It's nice that the Guardian Media Group loves it too.  But three giveaways about the same place?  What's going on?

Methinks something shifty's afoot.  The Guardianistas are planning an invasion.  Mind you, enough of the buggers live here already, it's not like it'll make that much difference. 

So watch out for Sunday's London to Brighton Mini Rally.  And if you see one being driven by a familiar-looking bloke in glasses, you'll know the invasion will have started.

MediaGuardian Website in 3 Eyed Reader Shocker

And on the subject of website revamps, have you seen what they've done to the MediaGuardian site? Jinkies, what's all that about? 

Actually I think it's rather a cunning stunt.  In days of yore, when all we had was ye olde traditional newspaperes to read, everybody in media land would buy The Guardian on a Monday.  How we loved its media section and, more importantly, the jobs bit at the back.  (Media job ads are a law unto themselves.  In an effort to cut down the droves of unsuitables who might apply, many ads will tag on a random element at the end - 'Banjo playing an advantage.'....'Must be in possession of all of Duran Duran's back catalogue' etc etc)

So I always bought The Guardian on a Monday, for years and years.  And then, like many people, I got in the habit of reading the website instead.  Until recently, when it suddenly became so busy it's practically unreadable.

Now, I learnt to read when I was 4, so I like to think that it's a well-embedded life skill.  Not so when you visit MG central.  First you start on the left - reading, reading, here are some words, oh look some bugger's left the BBC, how interesting.  But lo!  What is happening now?  Eyeball 2 is distracted by a big bunch of words and pics in the middle of the page, and sets off on an independent reading expedition.  Eyeball 3 does not exist, so there's nobody left to deal with the other column on the right hand side of the screen.  Eyeball 1 decides to have a shufty instead.  At this point I start to go boing-eyed and have to have a lie down.

Honestly, I have tried to read the new MediaGuardian site on several occasions, and have come away with a headache every time.  So today, for the first time in weeks, I went out and bought the paper instead.  And that's when I realised the wisdom of the redesign -  Make your website so it can only comfortably be read by creatures with 3 eyes, and everybody else will have to shell out for the paper.  Revenues rise and the newspaper industry is reinvigorated. Genius!