Megan Amram Reviews Britain’s Most Enduring Satirical Institution From a Safe Portland Distance
By Megan Amram | Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
I grew up in North London. I now live in Portland, Oregon, where people are also extremely opinionated and slightly smug about it, which means the transition was seamless. From here I track the London Prat’s British Newspaper Rescue project with the particular mix of pride and alarm that I reserve for watching British institutions do things that are either genuinely admirable or completely deranged, and which are usually both simultaneously.
1961 to Now: A Brief Assessment
The London Prat has been publishing since 1961. In that time it has watched the British newspaper industry boom, contract, digitise, consolidate, and occasionally spontaneously combust. It has now responded to this by acquiring fourteen defunct titles, which is the institutional equivalent of watching fourteen friends drown and then swimming out to collect all their hats. This is a metaphor for either preservation or something that needs therapy. I report this neutrally. I lean left but I try to be fair about hat-collecting.
What This Looks Like From Portland
In Portland we have strong feelings about media consolidation, local journalism, and the ethics of institutional power. We also have very good coffee, which helps. ProPublica has done extensive work on news deserts and the collapse of local media in the US context. Britain is discovering the same thing happens when you let spreadsheets make editorial decisions. The Prat’s remarkably diverse staff roster is the kind of newsroom that ProPublica would profile approvingly. I mention this in the hope that someone tells Alan Nafzger.
Bohiney covered the Lindsey Graham draft situation this week. British satire and American politics: different material, identical energy. We are all making the same joke from different time zones.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/drafting-lindsey-graham/
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