Get 'em out for the... readers: The Sun scraps its online paywall Rupert Murdoch's flagship British tabloid, The Sun, is to abandon its paywall in search of greater web traffic as it seeks to compete with big online news hitters such as the Daily Mail. According to the Guardian, the move was set to be officially announced on Friday and implemented by the end of November. Back in July 2013, …
disappointing that I still can't read Private Eye (with a subscription) online.
I thought the physical presentation of Eye was part of the core proposition. Like you, I am a man of high literature, although my preference is Viz. That too suffers from the same challenge of the paper copy being the real McCoy, and the screen version not quite making the grade.
> I thought the physical presentation of Eye was part of the core proposition.
Indeed but I don't subscribe because I move around a lot (contracting) so it would be nice to be able to catch up on what I've missed online.
Anyway, the medium is a challenge for a designer. Not me, I don't do design. But a designer. A good one, preferably.
On a side note, the BBC is running this story and it links to an article reporting it in the FT, which by hilarious irony is itself behind a paywall so you can't read it.
BBC story
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-34679817
FT link
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/dbc792ee-7efc-11e5-98fb-5a6d4728f74e.html#axzz3q3tfyRCp
Scandalous indeed that not enough people are willing to pay for their own brainwashing!
I mean, they pay to have their hair washed too, no?
they willingly pay for all sorts of minor services...
But getting their brain washed isn't worth some cash to them?
Poor mainstream media. I guess you'll need to go asking for money at your annual Bilderberger meeting. No worries, they're extremely well financed and they rely on you distorting everything and keeping people's minds on one fool's errand after another.
Reduced supply is what happens when you invoice your suppliers to deliver to your warehouse.
Is there third-party advertising? Then you are not the customer.
In the physical realm I suspect prices work because you don't go out to buy the Sun, you get a pack of cigarettes and it almost comes free with them.
As for the proxy-log popularity of the Mail, could it be due to their infinite length webpages skewing the results?
Seem to remember Murdoch's real gripe was that with the BBC providing so much internet news content for free that his rag couldn't compete.
I guess he thinks its going to be OK now that he has successfully paid the Tory party enough to castrate the BBC...
I noticed though a little while back that my proxy logs showed quite a change in the most popular news website and that now the Daily Mail website is by far the most hit from our large organisation.... It surprised me somewhat and since then I have been rather concerned about the obvious brain drain going on here as everyone sups from the fountain of the Daily Heil.
Then again, looking at the state of the company, it figures...
"....as everyone sups from the fountain of the Daily Heil."
We reached out (#) to the Daily Fail for their response to this alleged slight on their character. Their spokesman- a Mr H Harmsworth- responded "Hurrah for the blackshirts!" (##)
(#) Can anyone please explain why this horrid PR-esque phrase seems to be replacing "contacted" or "attempted to contact" in everyday use? I've seen people- rather unconvincingly- try to argue that it's not exactly the same thing, but it just sounds like fake-touchy-feely BS to me. Understandable coming from PR weasels, less so from supposedly impartial journalists.
(##) Yeah, I know, don't care... "The Daily Express was worse" isn't saying much ;-P
"The Daily Telegraph has a wall too, but it takes about 3 seconds to bypass it."
The DT subscription is now being touted for £12 rather than the previous £6. As long as the BBC, Independent, and Grauniad are not behind paywalls then the DT no longer has enough broadsheet gravitas to be worth coin of the realm.
Unfortunately the Independent has gone for a style change that crams a page full of pictures and article headers that is just too much. Looks and loads even worse than the re-styled Grauniad.
Well the DT is normally read by the over 75s.
Maybe the silver surfers are Internet savvy enough to pull out their wallets and pay the £12 ('hey, what's £12, we've never had it so good. My pension's going up at least 2.5% again'), but not tech savvy enough to understand how to get round it.
So I'd give the DT another 10 years or so before their cash-cow-audience dies off.
the Independent ........ Looks and loads even worse than the re-styled Grauniad.
That, Sir, is not possible. The Graun has degenerated into a sort of amateur-curated news aggregating blog (although I don't mind, if that's what they want to do with it).
The Indy is a far more painful loss. Remember at launch, it was a fresh voice, a broadsheet with gravitas and indeed an independent voice. Now it's just another shitty tabloid, owned by a Russian oligarch.
GCSE Statistics Paper Question
A "quality" newspaper recently asserted that: in 2013 another "newspaper" had 30 million audited users per month. But today, that "newspaper" now has 1 million readers per day.
Please tick one only one answer:
* The "newspaper" has 96% fewer readers today than in 2013.
* The "newspaper" has roughly the same number of readers per day.
* The "Grauniad" has a maths problem as well as all the others it's famous for.
"The "Grauniad" has a maths problem as well as all the others it's famous for."
It isn't a particularly great bit of reporting on their part, but since the Sun is behind a paywall, we can be reasonably sure that the million people today are the same million people tomorrow. So the unique monthly visitors are going to be roughly a million. So the writing is terrible, but the point is largely accurate.
To be fair, the standard of writing & more importantly reporting in all newspapers is absurdly low compared to historical norms. Look at a historic newspaper from a hundred years ago and see the difference. It's profoundly shocking, and frankly I think that they all deserve to go out of business given how poor the reporting is.
Too true. I've lost count of the number of basic schoolboy English errors I've spotted in even the supposedly high-brow broadsheet newspapers; confusion between 'there', 'they're' and 'their', confusion between 'your' and 'you're', 'drawers' spelt as 'draws', 'brakes' spelt as 'breaks', greengrocers' apostrophes... and so on.
And that's before you even consider the mangled sentence structure, which often makes headlines read as jokes, or the fact that most journalists writing today [El Reg's included] seem unable to find the preference which sets their spell-checker language to UK English and, consequently, churn out prose in a mixture of American and UK English —often spelling the same word both ways, in the same paragraph.
"Look at a historic newspaper from a hundred years ago and see the difference."
Yeah, funny that. A 100 years ago newspapers were cheap and they had a huge staff, reporters all over the place, copy editors, sub editors, proof readers and a budget for proper investigative journalism. In some cases they made huge profits for their owners too. You'd almost think there was no competition for news reporting back then.
The point about spell checkers, language selection and grammar checkers is well taken though.
Lets hope they don't un-paywall The Times - it's the only newspaper where the comments are civil and informed, because the cost keeps the extremists out ( although lots of lefties seemed to infiltrate during the Labour leadership election and haven't left yet, but I'm sure they will eventually ).
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