Estd. 2002. Politics, tech, startups, media, law, history, philosophy
Times Select is dead. Finally.
They’ve also opened up a huge part of their archives.
In addition to opening the entire site to all readers, The Times will also make available its archives from 1987 to the present without charge, as well as those from 1851 to 1922, which are in the public domain. There will be charges for some material from the period 1923 to 1986, and some will be free.
I think this is probably the most blatantly unquestioning and biased piece of “journalism” I have ever seen in my 26 years.
Government propaganda in the fourth estate. Ahern using a proxy to blacken the name of an investigation into corruption, via a national newspaper, which swallows it hook, line and sinker. How on earth did Jody Corcoran put his byline to that rubbish?
Groucho makes lots of denials on behalf of our Taoiseach.
He also rubbished reports that the Taoiseach never told the tribunal about the £50,000 lodgement to Celia Larkin’s accounts when he was obliged to disclosed all such details.
Mr O’Dea strongly denied that Celia Larkin had operated nominee bank accounts for the Taoiseach which he failed to disclose, and that the Taoiseach sought details from the bank about key lodgements long before the tribunal has specific queries about these lodgements.
And the evidence to back up these denials? So Ahern is saying th Tribunal deceived us? Can we have something to back that up please?
The money quote from Mr Corcoran:
But Mr Ahern is in no mood to further facilitate the tribunal.
Then obstruct it Mr Ahern, or attempt to bring it down, as your corrupt predecessor tried to do to McCracken.
I have to stop this post, before I lose the head.
As usual, the only sane voice in the Sindo is Gene Kerrigan. And what does he say about Ahern’s story?
There’s only one word — blunt and crude as it might be — that’s appropriate to what we’ve heard. And that word is bullshit.
The New York Post is saying that the NY Times is due to abandon Timesselect, it’s pay-for wall that many believe never really made any sense. It’s a good move for the Times and can only bring in more readers – and much needed advertising revenue. Now if only the Irish Times would do the same.
Time have a cover story this week on media mogul Rupert Murdoch. That MySpace deal looks eye-wateringly cheap looking back at it. As for his thoughts on where newspapers are going: (my emphasis)
When Murdoch talks about the future of newspapers, you get a sense of how contemporary he really is. Circulation and advertising revenues are ebbing away everywhere, he notes, proportional to broadband penetration. “You’ve really got to worry,” he says. “Tribune Co.’s revenues [in May] dropped 11% across broadcasting and newspapers. That’s huge. The Times dropped 8.5%. Half of men under 30 aren’t reading print newspapers, and there’s no sign that they come back as they age.”
How does he respond to this bleak picture? By musing about investing even more in newspapers. “What if, at the Journal, we spent $100 million a year hiring all the best business journalists in the world? Say 200 of them. And spent some money on establishing the brand but went global — a great, great newspaper with big, iconic names, outstanding writers, reporters, experts. And then you make it free, online only. No printing plants, no paper, no trucks. How long would it take for the advertising to come? It would be successful, it would work and you’d make … a little bit of money. Then again, the Journal and the Times make very little money now.”
Ouch. For those of us working in the newspaper industry these are pretty harsh words. But then I and many others have been harping on about the decline of print newspapers for several years now. Increasing broadband penetration = declining newspaper buying. What is the cheapest way to publish? Online. Where are people increasingly reading? Online. Where should you be driving your readers? Online.
The traditional print industry is in real crisis in countries where broadband is increasing – the NYTimes figures speak for themselves. Online seems like the most obvious place to go.
But why does Murdoch want to buy the WSJ then? What has the WSJ got that Murdoch wants? Brand recognition, loyalty and history. He believes he can make money from it too. Online.
Since Ireland is so behind in the broadband stakes, it seems clear that Irish newspapers have extra time to adjust to the coming shift in readership. I just wonder if they will be ready.
Hehe.
… I would have thought that, although the decline in readership … will probably go on…
WSJ: They’re all going to MySpace.
Mr. Murdoch: I wish they were. They’re all going to Facebook at the moment.
The Washington Post has taken the plunge – to link to rival newspaper sites.
I can’t understand why this has not happened sooner. Most bloggers realise that linking actually helps traffic, and doesn’t drive away readers as conventional wisdom suggests.
Online media outlets like Slate or Salon prominently feature their links to other sites and some, particularly blogs, are built around the strength of their links. But newspapers have been reluctant to direct readers outside their own gates. These deals with Inform are but one indication that newspapers may be reconsidering long-held beliefs about how to compete, and cooperate, with other publishers.
“Five years ago, everybody said you have to keep readers on your site, with no links out to other sites,” said Caroline H. Little, chief executive and publisher of Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive, the online division of the Washington Post Company. “But ultimately, people will go where they want to go.”
But still they believe in forcing new windows to open when they click on these external links. People will go where they want to go… so just let it open in the same window. But at least the executive editor at the washingtonpost.com seems to get it:
“We think it’s the right thing to do,” Mr. Brady said. “It seems limiting to tell people about something another news organization has reported and not point them to it. It goes against the Web’s DNA.”
Welcome to the WWW.
A Fox reporter in the wrong place at the wrong time. He alleges later that the IDF tanks were firing warning shots to get him out of the area. The reaction of the Fox panel is quite funny.
Ouch.
O’Reilly has again been trumpeting print newspapers this time calling them the “ultimate browser”.
The response of Independent News & Media, the owner of The Independent and The Independent On Sunday, to the march of new media had been measured and thoughtful, he said.
Sir Anthony said he believed we are in another period of wild stock-market overstatement for a certain class of media assets. Although this period would pass, in the meantime conventional media – terrestrial TV, cable, radio, newspapers and magazines – had been relegated in many investors’ minds to a “show me your model status”.
Speaking at the company’s annual meeting in Dublin, Sir Anthony said the multiplication of media devices which concentrate on the individual’s needs at any given point had made it much more difficult to aggregate large audiences.
In these circumstances, TV, newspapers and magazines, and to a degree radio, remained the best and the only way for mass audiences for goods and services to be created. However, the internet could yield an extraordinary opportunity to the newspaper industry on the production side in putting together its products at a much lower cost.
“If we exempt newsprint, the real cost of newspapers lies in putting them together – writing them, editing them, producing pages, getting them camera-ready, producing plates, printing, and finally in distribution,” Sir Anthony said.
Asked after the meeting whether he would sell his London-based titles, which are loss-making, he insisted: “No, absolutely not.”
Now this debate has been raging since before I started putting pixels online. What is the place of newspapers in a world where the Internet offers a far cheaper, and some would say more efficient means of distribution?
The editor of the Guardian, Alan Rusbridger, recently mounted a robust defence of journalism and of printed newspapers, dismissing reports that the death knell has sounded for “old media”. This is at the same time as the Guardian becomes the “first British national newspaper to offer a “web first” service that will see major news by foreign correspondents and business journalists put online before it appears in the paper.”
The Guardian has blazed the trail for blogging, all the way back to the first Guardian blog awards in 2002. The new commentisfree portal now boasts 50,000 reader comments and 2 million montly page impressions since launching in March. Rusbridger also says things like:
“What we’re doing, which no newspaper has ever done before, is to take your elite stable of columnists, who are paid, and pitch them into the same space as people who aren’t paid,” he said.
“What is professional journalism and what isn’t, and how do they share the same space? We’re making this up as we go along.”
Have a listen to Rusbridger speak at an RSA lecture here too.
So what is happening? I’m waiting to see, but I think O’Reilly has the wrong idea and is taking an unnecessarily defensive line with regard to new media. I will be posting more about this topic.