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UK Press — Comments Off on Newspaper executives should look away now
30
Jun 10

Newspaper executives should look away now

Hard on the heels of the news that online advertising revenue will soon be the largest category of ad income in the UK, comes this polling result on the sites people go to for their online news. As The Guardian reported it:

“Newspaper executives should look away now. For the 83% that said they had accessed news online in the past month, websites of the national newspapers didn’t even make the top five. The top five visited news websites for these users were, in order: BBC News (34%), Google News (17%), Sky News (6%), Yahoo! (5%), and MSN (5%).” (Full version of the story, revealing a strong preference for print, here).

What’s the common denominator among those five sites? They’re either aggregators or broadcasters. So they have immediacy and range (or breadth).

Much of the logic behind newspapers putting paywalls round part or all of their content makes sense. But one of the flaws in the argument is they can’t quite compete on either. However excellent the journalism in the Financial Times, the Times or the Sunday Times can they be seen as valuable enough to pay for – when these results seem to give a clear guide what people actually opt for when wielding a mouse?

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Uncategorized — Comments Off on Weekend miscellany: Assange, Kenyan corruption, why is sport so huge, the missed banking story and Iran
12
Jun 10

Weekend miscellany: Assange, Kenyan corruption, why is sport so huge, the missed banking story and Iran

I’m increasingly finding, as this blog finds its feet, that I reach the end of the working week with a bunch of links which I’d like to pass on but which don’t require much comment or elaboration. I’m going to try bundling them into a single post. From time to time these pieces will have already appeared in “What I’m Reading” (just to the right of here) but that feed often osbcures the real subject of something I’ve clipped into Delicious. What follows is an eclectic selection, so there’s no point in trying to pretend that there’s any common thread.

  • Fascinating drama now going on around Wikileaks as the US government goes after its founder Julian Assange. Some background here. A more recent summary from The Economist, containing an intriguing little hint from Pentagon Papers man Daniel Ellsberg.
  • I’ve been reading properly for the first time It’s Our Turn to Eat by Michela Wrong, the story of John Githongo, the man who exposed deep-seated, systemic corruption in the Kenyan political elite. The book is a superbly-written tragi-comedy: Githongo “exposed” a lot of appalling evidence but failed to dent the practice by which Kenyan ministers plunder the country’s treasury. But thanks to the depth of Wrong’s knowledge of her subject, the book is also a history of modern Kenya – and a very dispiriting chronicle at that. When Kenya’s tribal rivalries explode again, as Wrong predicts they surely will, reading this book will explain what is happening and why. Among her many qualities as a writer, Wrong is unafraid to take aim at conventional pieties. As they say in Texas, sacred cows make the best burgers.
  • Especially at World Cup you may occasionally wonder how sport, all sport, got so big. Because once upon a time, sport just wasn’t that huge a thing. When you don’t read much a subject – and I don’t read much about sport – you like an issue fully dealt with in a single place. This piece by Tim de Lisle from Intelligent Life is it.
  • Sometimes it takes a non-journalist to spot that journalists are asleep at the wheel. Not every document that emerges from the Bank of England is newsworthy or even comprehensible but the one spotted in this post was. As the perenially interesting MP Frank Field remarks here, this was not a story which either the Financial Times sor The Times ought to have missed.
  • A cluster of excellent stories from The Guardian on Iran at the first anniversary of last year’s stalled “green” revolution-that-wasn’t.

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Experiments / UK Press — Comments Off on The next big thing, quite huge in fact
24
May 10

The next big thing, quite huge in fact

Wonderful news! A subject big and important enough to drown the stream of posts and tweets on the theme of do-I-or-don’t-I love the iPad.

Data.

I can’t claim to have worked out all the implications for journalists (let alone for the world) and that’s because I haven’t kept up with the rapidly growing literature. Shameful ignorance, but I’m working on it. Mainly by starting with this useful entry-level primer from the Guardian Datablog. More soon.

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Social Media / US Press — Comments Off on Channelling George Orwell
20
May 10

Channelling George Orwell

The last time I attended the award ceremony for the George Orwell Prize some years back, the party was in a small room and seemed to be attended by 19 people, most of whom worked for the New Statesman. Since then, the prize and the party have grown and there are now three prizes: for a book, journalism and a blog.

But the unexpected thrill of the evening lay in the homage to Orwell’s cantakerous and contra-suggestive spirit. The judges refused to be either predictable or politically correct. They gave the journalism prize not to the (excellent) people from The Guardian or The Times but to Peter Hitchens for his pieces of long reportage for the Mail on Sunday. The judges for that category – in case you were thinking that Orwell’s heirs had managed to smuggle neocons onto the jury – were the film-maker Roger Graef and the pollster and journalist Peter Kellner. As well-qualified a pair of establishment liberals as you could hope to find.

The blog prize went to Winston Smith for a blog called Working With the Underclass. I’ve never looked at it but I will now. Aspirant prizewinners will now be mining Orwell’s novels for noms-de-plume with the right ring to appeal to next year’s judges. And the book prize went not to books on international or political topics but to Keeper by Andrea Gillies, a memoir of dealing with Alzheimers. The subtitle “A book about memory, identity, isolation, Wordsworth and cake” probably catches the flavour.

Almost certainly everyone on the shortlists is worth reading and they can be found here. I bought four of the six shortlisted books afterwards and look forward to them all.

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Political Journalism — Comments Off on News media, women, politics = bias?
17
May 10

News media, women, politics = bias?

Extensive criticism of current affairs broadcasters in this morning’s Guardian media section of how old, male and grey were the vast majority of commentators and interviewees on television along the election trail. Over in The Times, a coincidental counterpoint from Libby Purves on the shortage of female cabinet ministers. Not strictly an argument based on the media’s talking heads, but Libby’s I-don’t-really-care-any-more conclusion could equally well apply to the news media.

Facts only clutter a debate, I know, but if anyone’s interested in whether there’s any basis to the complaint about men taking back the airwaves, my City University colleague Lis Howell has actually had people count them. The results are here and if you have a subscription to Broadcast magazine, you can see an extended analysis by Lis here. The skew towards male voices and faces is so weird that I’m wondering if it’s better explained as simple ignorance and lack of imagination by broadcast producers rather than “gender bias”.

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