Late last autumn, Trinity Mirror launched a series of ‘hyper-local’ websites in Northern England, mostly populated by local, volunteer writers. Now they are taking the content from these sites and publishing six free weeklies.
Michael Kinsley has this suggestion about how to to save your local newspaper.
How about nothing?You may love the morning ritual of the paper and coffee, as I do, but do you seriously think that this deserves a subsidy? Sorry, but people who have grown up around computers find reading the news on paper just as annoying as you find reading it on a screen.
As many have pointed out, more people are spending more time reading news and analysis than ever before. They’re just doing it online.
It’s as if after the invention of the phone, marketing managers figured out people where using phones to talk about their brands, and dubbed that phenomenon “social media”.
And they went: “We should do something with phones!”
Which is utterly besides the point, people talk to their friends over the phone about brands, because the brand is relevant to them, not ‘cause that brand happens to have a phone number.
The first wave of blogs were tech-focused, and then for whatever reason, they turned to politics next. And so Web 2.0-style political coverage has had a decade to mature into its current state.
What’s happened with technology and politics is happening elsewhere too, just on a different timetable. Sports, business, reviews of movies, books, restaurants – all the staples of the old newspaper format are proliferating online. There are more perspectives; there is more depth and more surface now. And that’s the new growth. It’s only started maturing.
In fact, I think in the long run, we’re going to look back at many facets of old media and realize that we were living in a desert disguised as a rain forest.
Last week (w/e 14/03/09) Twitter.com was the 54th most visited website in the UK, up from 66th the week before. One consequence of Twitter rapid rise up the rankings is that the micro-blogging service has now overtaken most of the UK newspapers online. … Last week Twitter received more UK Internet visits than the homepages of the Guardian, Times, Sun and Telegraph. It also over took Google News UK. Of the main newspaper homepages, only the Daily Mail received more UK Internet visits than Twitter last week. Hitwise
Daily Mail readers obviously have figured how to get Twitter to work on their Sinclairs.
Clay Shirky on Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable
Back in 1993, the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain began investigating piracy of Dave Barry’s popular column, which was published by the Miami Herald and syndicated widely. In the course of tracking down the sources of unlicensed distribution, they found many things, including the copying of his column to alt.fan.dave_barry on usenet; a 2000-person strong mailing list also reading pirated versions; and a teenager in the Midwest who was doing some of the copying himself, because he loved Barry’s work so much he wanted everybody to be able to read it.
One of the people I was hanging around with online back then was Gordy Thompson, who managed internet services at the New York Times. I remember Thompson saying something to the effect of “When a 14 year old kid can blow up your business in his spare time, not because he hates you but because he loves you, then you got a problem.”
Remember that gift of classic American DVDs that US President Obama gave to Prime Minister Gordon Brown? They are all Region 1 discs They are unplayable here.
The most important quote from yesterday’s link
“Anyone in the content business knows that their product is not newspapers, or broadcasts, or magazines, or even news, or even content, or even information. No! It is readership. Your product is readership, which you sell to advertisers.”
To date, the PI site looks terrible. If possible, it looks worse than the newspaper has looked. It looks like the newspaper looked in about 1965—hemmed in by lots of type. It’s disorganized, unfocused, and agonizingly bland. Still, this isn’t, theoretically, what the new product will be. What’s on the site now still reflects what’s in the paper. And there won’t be a paper. What’s there is the product of 165 news people and the news site will be the product of just 20 news people.
That will likely make it a better site.
Reblogged from Chuck via SoupSoup
The House voted 328-93 to approve a bill imposing 90% taxes on employee bonuses from firms bailed out by taxpayers.
The bill would tax bonuses paid by firms that received more than $5 billion from the TARP. The Senate is working on its own plan to try to recoup bonuses.
Half of me thinks this is great news, the other half thinks we’ve officially gone off the deep end.
It’s very rare that one gets to write the words ‘Bill of Attainder’ but that is exactly what this is – a law that is directed a specific group of people.
Now, I’m no US Constitutional scholar, but it says in pretty clearly in Section 1, Article 9, Clause 3 ‘No Bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed.’ This law is both.
I’m betting that they eventually keep their dosh.