Guardian TEFL fades away
Looking at the pages of Education Guardian, there are four much loved (and for some reason also much hated) letters that have recently gone missing, and those letters are T,E,F and L. The Guardian TEFL pages still exist, but I don’t know how anyone would end up there without a single internal link on the Guardian webpages. I can’t say it will be much missed (last blog post 21 February 2007, most recent “articles” being ones persuading people to take TEFL courses written by people who work for TEFL course providers- first openly and then hidden after blogs pointed it out, a level of churnalism impressive even by recent UK standards), but it still seems like the end of an era for someone of my TEFL generation who went to the paper version every Tuesday for TEFL jobs and occasional news and to the newspaper nearly every other day for our obligatory unthinking left wing TEFLer views.
Obviously it happened because TEFL job advertising had long gone online elsewhere (even more than job ads in general), TEFLers are not up there with media types as an advertiser’s chosen market, and previous attempts to make money in related areas like Guardian Languages had failed. That The (long anti New Labour) Guardian can be so obviously capitalist is still a shock to the hidden teenager in me, but it is enlightening just a little to realise that Guardian Media make most of their money from the (secretly Trotskyist??) AutoTrader.co.uk
Tags: News
September 5th, 2009 at 7:32 pm
No, no – you’ve got it wrong, Alex. Autotrader is not ‘secretly Trotskyist’ anymore – now they’re quite open about it!
September 6th, 2009 at 6:45 am
It doesn’t surprise me, Alex – another nail in the coffin for newspapers. With readership dropping like lead weights, it’s anybody’s prediction how long they’ll last, but I doubt it’ll be that long.
I’m sure newspapers won’t disappear, but they’ll soon be dropping in status (if they haven’t already done so) as online media take over.
September 7th, 2009 at 3:36 pm
[...] Prejudice: Guardian TEFL Jump to Comments Along with Alex Case, we at Marxist TEFL, had long since tired of Guardian TEFL with its deeply embedded ideology and [...]
September 8th, 2009 at 9:05 am
Right, how many of those Guardian TEFL ‘articles’ were written by Laura Harrison – who just happens to work for Cactus? More than just a few, I think you’ll find.
September 18th, 2009 at 7:49 am
Maybe I spoke too soon (me????). There seems to be quite a lot of TEFLy stuff here:
http://www.guardianweekly.co.uk/education