Once businesses used to express their commitment to their products with advertising lines like, “A Passion for Chocolate”. Then as businesses became increasingly diversified you would hear directors who had grown up in companies that had a range of related products pleading, “We need to stick to the knitting.”
Whatever we think about proprietors like Rupert [...]
Opinion polls have long given newspapers good news stories. Yet I have had an increasing sense that they were being overdone, a cheap way of getting what look like strong factual tales into the pages.
Going through a paper the third poll-based story is wearisome and irritation that they can’t get out and do their own [...]
An intriguing detail in today’s Times story about the Lebedev purchase of the Standard is the involvement of Matthew Freud. This suggests a line of communication to the heart of News Corporation (Freud’s wife is Elisabeth Murdoch). Could it provide an escape from the inane, debilitating free-sheet war between thelondonpaper and London Lite?
A fresh start [...]
On Monday (Jan 12) Archant announced that it was to cut a further 20 jobs from the East Anglian Daily Times and the Evening Star in Ipswich (Guardian report). The following night several hundred people packed the Debenham High School assembly hall with with more unable to get in.
I saw no sign of a reporter [...]
It is good to have your choice of place to live confirmed by a survey as having the second best quality of life in Great Britain. Even nicer that the East Anglian Daily Times chooses to illustrate the story with a picture of our village with our house in the foreground.
Despite my distrust of polls [...]
Given the state the regional press, the news that Trinity Mirror in the Midlands is making 300 staff redundant but telling them they can reapply for their jobs is hardly surprising.
The marvel is that the Birmingham Post, one of the titles involved, has survived at all. I left the paper in the early 1970s, made [...]
The intro on Jeff Jarvis’s Digital Media column in the Guardian today had a familiar ring. It was, given a bit of subbing to sharpen it up, the same as one on his blog on July 10.
Is this testing the argument or, in the web jargon, some form of “crowd-sourcing” or a kind of informal [...]
Dying elderly readers has long been one of the problems for the Telegraph’s circulation department. Now the paper seems to have found a way of making money out of them. Today I received by post a special offer of 50 quid off a funeral plan. I can’t find the same offer online.
Jeff Jarvis, in the most recent addendum to his latest polemic, Google as the new press room, says: “I’m causing confusion aplenty”. He sure is — thinking as the responses to his latest post come in. Not unusual for Jarvis.
The centre of his argument is that newspapers are bad at technology so they should [...]
Roy Greenslade says the New Zealand Press Council has warned that outsourcing production and subbing reduces local oversight bringing an increased risk of errors and offending local sensitivies.
