More joined up thinking from the independent
I’ve previously mentioned the Independent’s policy of balancing “we’re destroying the planet” headlines with “have a cheap flight” offers, but the feckless juxtapostion on this morning’s front page is crass even for them. (Click the image for a closer look) Isn’t it a demonstration that, really, they couldn’t care less?
It goes without saying that these days newspapers are little more than a dating agency (I’m being polite) between consumer and advertiser. On many - if not most - newspapers, the staff employed to sell advertising space outnumber the editorial staff and reporters. In a final analysis, the news and comment is the filler between the ads. There’s no morality to it hence the likes of the Independent front page today. It’s advertising revenue not the readership that keeps an newspaper afloat. That’s why the Guardian can espouse a green agenda while accepting advertising from car manufacturers. Why the Independent can wring it’s hands over carbon dioxide emissions while shilling cheap air travel.
No? It’d be interesting to see a survey of the number of people who bought today’s Independent on spec and whether it was the chance of winning flights to New York or yet more downbeat news about the state of the planet that made them shell out. I wonder, from a strictly economic point of view, if the latter are regarded as highly as the former by the bean counters.
Posted on April 15th, 2006 at 11:34 am
The productive life…
Picture the scene. It’s the McKeating family breakfast table. Opened cereal boxes, a pint of milk, half-reduced, plucking beads of condensate from the slightly steamy air. Cups of tea all round. McKeating père: seated. On his left, a laptop PC,….
Time for a new daily paper to emerge from the most talented and principled corners of the blogosphere?
Fancy editing?
Matthew Cuffe
http://www.myspace.com/matthewcuffe
http://blairwitch.typepad.com
http://www.myspace.com/blairwitchimpeachment
http://www.myspace.com/cab999
The Independent has decided it’s going to be the doom’n'gloom equivalent of the Express/Mail, only using the Red/Green cliches. Clearly they think this is a sales-winning formula, even if their coverage makes the New Internationalist seem like a carefully nuanced and considered journal by comparison. Although I’m sure there are plenty of people who buy it for the doom’n'gloom AND the cheap flights offers, it may of course just be going for the scattergun approach (so long as they buy the paper, who cares?)
As for bloggers setting up a newspaper, nice idea but the costs of setting one would be prohibitive, or at least sufficient to entail a whole bunch of compromises. There’s a reason loads of people blog: it’s cheap (and easy). Your best bet is to infiltrate the current media system, although even something like Comment is Free is proving fairly resistant to fully embracing the British blogs.
Agree regarding costs.
How about an internet newspaper incorporating the best of the blogosphere?
I have tried infiltrating the mainstream and frankly I have grown weary with the meagre returns.
Any thoughts?
To say nothing of the fact that the lead story is tosh:
“If the models are correct, global warming reduces the temperature differences between the poles and the equator. When you have less difference in temperature, you have less excitation of extratropical storms, not more. And, in fact, model runs support this conclusion. Alarmists have drawn some support for increased claims of tropical storminess from a casual claim by Sir John Houghton of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that a warmer world would have more evaporation, with latent heat providing more energy for disturbances. The problem with this is that the ability of evaporation to drive tropical storms relies not only on temperature but humidity as well, and calls for drier, less humid air. Claims for starkly higher temperatures are based upon there being more humidity, not less–hardly a case for more storminess with global warming.”
MIT Professor of Atmospheric Science Richard Lindzen
With thanks to:
http://cafehayek.typepad.com/hayek/
>In a final analysis, the news and comment is the filler between the ads.
It has never been anything else, in any mainstream newspaper. Newspapers are run by accountants.
>The Independent has decided it’s going to be the doom’n’gloom equivalent of the Express/Mail
Market segmentation. Most people buy papers they agree with, just as people like to read blogs they agree with.
If the Express could work out what its readers want (clearly not a diet of asylum seeker hysteria and Diana) then its sales wouldn’t be in freefall.
Unless it embraced the whole political spectrum, an internet newspaper would end up no different anyway. It would just be biased towards whatever you believe to be right.
An internet newspaper is indeed on its way. CY has already been asked to join. We’re trying to work out the kinks in our implementation of Scoop as I write.
Yes, I know I’m regarded as somewhere out on the far right but the paper will indeed be all views.
Hoping to do Beta in the next 10 days.
Yes, I really would like writers that I profoundly disagree with to contribute.
We’d be expecting people to cross post pieces: no, we won’t be paying, just offering an extra outlet…plus we’ve signed up with a syndication agency so that if there is an MSM buyer for your piece it’s easy for them to do so. We step out of the loop.
About newspaper finances. Something I know about. Subscription/sales revenue just about covers the cost of distribution, newsprint and presses. Ads pay for the journalists. Guardian Online is profitable, remember?
Hypocrisy…
The Independent’s Saturday front page is shockingly, embarrasingly hypocritical.
……
[...] More at Chicken Yoghurt, from where the illustration was pilfered. [...]
[...] Chicken Yoghurt has some pointed questions about the Independent’s commitment to environmentalism. Why are they giving away free flights on the same front pages that fret about global warming, Justin McKeating wants to know. [...]
Agreed that the indie has gone down the tubes. However, while David offers an interesting point of view, no one can predict the effect of climate change - especially with regard to ocean currents and their effect on the weather.
Mandy - I think people would be less pissed off with the Indie/Mail/Express if they were well written and appropriately caveated instead of this jingo baiting approach we seem to be swamped with. Short term it worksd a treat, but after a while people tend to switch off.
An internet newspaper is indeed on its way.
Interesting outline, Mr. Worstall. However, reminded me of a piece on blogging and its apparent peak in terms of mainstream interest (marketing, alternative outlet for newspaper etc). One pertinent was [paraphrasing]: “Would you want a newspaper that was all wire services, op-ed columns and reviews?” Like it or not, that sums up the state of current affairs blogging today.
Moorethanthis: “all wire services, op-ed columns and reviews”
Isn’t that all what British newspapers are these days? Oh, I forgot, all that lifestyle bollocks as well. Classy investigative and non-spun reporting is in the distinct minority in the contemporary press. Real news, apparently, just doesn’t sell anymore.
Funnily enough, I did recently try with a few journalist friends to get a new local newspaper off the ground in Brighton. Needless to say, it didn’t fly.
The problem we found is that there’s no democratic way to do it in a committee - we wanted to give everybody a stake and a say in the thing but it’s a recipe for disaster. That’s why, I think, newspaper editors are bastards - they have to be to get anything done. There are shit jobs on newspapers and somebody has to do them.