Guardian and Telegraph’s tit for tat battle

The Guardian and the Telegraph appeared to be locked in something of a tit for tat battle.

Today the lead story on Media Guardian states: “Hadfield quits Telegraph group, saying newspapers have no future” – which as a headline, seems to rather over-egg what he said.

The PaidContent blog post from which the story is sourced has the Telegraph head of digital development saying: “The future is much more diverse. There’s not a dichotomy between being a journalist and an entrepreneur – the future is the individual journalist, not big media.

‘The challenge is for big, monolithic media to recognise that being entrepreneurial is corporate ethos, to reflect in the structure to leverage the skills of the individual within the organisation.”

When Press Gazette called Hadfield today he said: “I don’t believe newspapers are dying, I just believe they won’t be necessarily about news and they won’t necessarily be mainly on paper, but then they haven’t been that for many a year.”

Media Guardian has minutely chronicled the travails of Telegraph Media Group through successive rounds of cost cuttings and redundancies, much to the annoyance of many Telegraph insiders.

The Telegraph for its part published a weird story about Guardian News and Media this week reporting that it had made an operating loss of £55.3m. It appeared that GNM’s losses had ballooned from the £36.8m reported in the 2008/2009 figures last year.

But closer examination revealed that the story used the GNM Limited Company accounts, which are compiled in a slightly different way from the Plc ones, to re-state financials which had alread been reported by GMG. It was very old news indeed, perhaps explaining why it was not followed up anywhere and did not apparently make it on to the website.

I’m not saying journalists on these two publications are making things up. But they do seem to go out of their way to portray each other in a negative light.