Marina Hyde is an English journalist who is a columnist for The Guardian newspaper. Hyde writes three articles each week for the paper, on current affairs, celebrity, and sport.
Hyde began her career in journalism as a temporary secretary on the showbiz desk at The Sun newspaper. In an otherwise unrelated article in The Guardian, she wrote: "I am only called Marina Hyde because my real name was too long to fit across a single column in The Sun, where I started out". She was later sacked by Sun editor David Yelland after it emerged she had been exchanging emails with Piers Morgan, editor of rival newspaper the Daily Mirror.
''The Guardian''
Since 2000, Hyde has worked at The Guardian, at first writing the newspaper's Diary column. She contributes three columns a week: one on sport, one on celebrity, and one which is typically about politics. Her sport column appears on Thursday; her celebrity column is entitled Lost in Showbiz and appears in the G2 supplement each Friday. She has a regular serious column in the main section of The Guardian on Saturday, as well as a column in the "Weekend" supplement, in which she parodies a celebrity diary entry. This is entitled A Peek at the Diary of..., which ends in the sign-off, "As seen by Marina Hyde". Hyde was nominated as Columnist of the Year in the 2010 British Press Awards. A libel action brought by Elton John against The Guardian, in reaction to Hyde's spoof diary column "A peek at the diary of... 'Sir Elton John'", published in July 2008, was rejected. The judge, Mr Justice Tugendhat, said that in this case "irony" and "teasing" do not amount to defamation. Hyde published a follow-up diary of Elton John in 2009. In November 2011, The Guardian was required to apologise to The Sun newspaper for an article in which Hyde had falsely alleged the newspaper had visited the home of a member of the legal team of the Leveson Inquiry. In the front-page story Hyde had accused The Sun of "blowing a giant raspberry at Lord Justice Leveson’s inquiry". The Suns then managing editor Richard Caseby sent a toilet roll accompanied by "a squalid note" to Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger after Hyde's false story. A few months later, Caseby once again objected to an article by Hyde in which, according to Roy Greenslade, she was "employing irony", in a reference to Page 3 models following a comment on Twitter by Rupert Murdoch and the use by The Sun of a photograph of model Reeva Steenkamp in a bikini, on the day after her murder. Caseby objected to the article, and complained to The Guardians readers' editor, but his complaint was the only one received. Hyde received two awards from the Sports Journalists' Association in February 2020, including Sports Journalist of the Year, the first woman to receive the award in its 43-year history. The other award was for Sports Columnist of the Year. She had worked during the year on stories concerning the decision to award a knighthood to Geoff Boycott, Tiger Woods at the 2019 Masters and the Women's World Cup.
Other work
Hyde's book about celebrity, Celebrity: How Entertainers Took Over the World and Why We Need an Exit Strategy, was published in 2009. She appeared occasionally as a reviewer on the BBC's Newsnight Review.
Personal life
In 1999, Hyde married Kieran Oliver Edward Clifton. The couple had a child in 2010 and live in London. Their third child was born in summer 2014.
