virtualeconomics

Daily Mash tells the news how it is

From today's Daily Mash article, "BRITISH MEDIA URGED TO DO DECENT THING WITH REVOLVER":

"The Daily Telegraph is showered with awards because it offered to buy a CD-ROM with MPs expenses on it.

"The Guardian is currently even more pleased with itself than usual because it's publishing classified information that not a single one of its journalists helped to gather.

"The News of the World proclaims itself as the greatest newspaper in the world because of its rare journalistic ability to record mobile phone conversations."

Google's reading age tool - comparing US news sources

Last one of these for now - I've run the Google reading age numbers for the main US news sites too, with the results you see to the left. 

"Main" US news sites in this context are a combination of the Hitwise and Nielssen data as reported in Pew's State of the News Media 2010 report. 

Confirmation of the expected includes business and finance websites using the most challenging language (less basic, more intermediate - almost no major site uses much advanced language according to this schema, except Facebook). By this point I'm not surprised that the aggregators come out using more challenging language than their constituents - I can't yet account for it, but is seems to be consistent across the board.

That the Washington Times and LA Times use almost the same complexity of language as Fox is more of a surprise, but living in England I know Fox only through its abominable reputation. Perhaps American right-wing demagoguery is more articulate than ours.  

Support for #ukuncut in unexpected quarters?

Currently running on the Daily Mail website - a poll asking the question "do you still support the students after these riots?" Never mind the phrasing of the question, which a cynical observer might even consider loaded; at time of writing respondents have voted overwhelmingly "yes", by 63 to 37 per cent of the vote.

Possibly this merely proves that the Mail's online audience genuinely supports the students' right to protest, regardless of how they are asked or the negativity with which those demonstrations have been portrayed through much of the mainstream media. If so, I take my hat off to those readers - the right to legitimate political dissent is one I am pleased to see attract such support.

Latest on Posettigate

Thinking about Posettigate again, the interesting thing now that the case has been effectively dropped is what it's possible to believe about Chris Mitchell's motives in bringing it in the first place.

(1) He genuinely believed that a newspaper editor suing a journalist for defamation was a sensible and positive way to protect his professional reputation, and that the consequences for his reputation would be positive.

(2) He knew what everyone else immediately spotted - that the consequences for his professional reputation would be disastrous (though perhaps not as globally disastrous as it has proved) - but for some other reason he went ahead and did it anyway.

No-one else believed (1), and everyone says the guy is neither mad nor stupid. What might reason (2) be?

Update: newspaper of record poll

Last week loyal readers will recall I posted up a poll to see whether the Times was still considered the UK's newspaper of record, now its website sits inaccessibly behind a paywall.

Since then Roy Greenslade very kindly picked up my question and linked back to the poll, which brought a lot more votes in over the past few days. Also the Telegraph is now thought to be implementing its own paywall next year which complicates the picture.

The results are currently about 3/1 in favour of the Times not being our newspaper of record, but they're still based on a relatively small sample (150 people) and there's a significant pro-Guardian weighting to the sample, almost certainly because so many participants came from the link there. So if you haven't already do click on the link to vote, and if you can get the poll in front of Telegraph, Times, Indy or Mail readers too that would certainly make the sample more robust. Thanks. 

Why a paywall might make sense for the Telegraph this time

Earlier today the FT broke the news that the Telegraph is (probably) joining the Times, FT and indeed News of the World by putting up a paywall next year. A spokesman told Reuters by email that "absolutely no decisions have been made on the introduction of a paid-content model," but a number of Telegraph execs appear to have confirmed to the FT that there would be a paywall in place before the end of 2011. 

Paywall experiments over the past ten years have been a disaster for online newspapers. However, the Telegraph's move could perhaps be justified by two fundamental changes to this market - an increased scarcity of professional journalism online, and the effective collapse of the Telegraph's current commercial model, occasioned primarily by Facebook. 

Freedom of tweets - hopefully a solved problem

The editor-in-chief of The Australian, Chris Mitchell, says he will sue journalism commentator Julie Possetti for defamation after she tweeted the allegedly false claim that for political reasons he stifled debate on man-made climate change at the paper. The details of the story are at Crikey.

Jay Rosen asks "what newspaper has ever revealed itself to be such a threat to freedom of the press as The Australian?", and j-blogger Jonathon Oakes calls it "a ridiculous vanity suit", pointing to a recent pattern of The Australian squabbling with the internet. 

Happily, freedom of tweets is pretty much a solved problem, as we saw with the #iamspartacus response to the Twitter Joke Trial. And while I can't quite claim to be going first, since blogger Syd Walker has already reproduced the allegedly defamatory tweet on her blog, I'll happily take the honour of going second.

Is the Times still the UK's newspaper of record?

 Since the Times swept its website behind a paywall, its content is almost unique amongst UK newspapers in being inaccessible to the general public - only a relative handful of print and online subscribers can now read what appears therein. Clay Shirky says it is now a newsletter. Emily Bell says that it "conceivably has outlived its editorial purpose as a lever of influence." And yet we continue to list it as the UK's primary newspaper of record. I do not believe it should be any longer so regarded, and have knocked up a poll to assess the matter - click here if you'd like to vote.

Subeditors or spellcheckers?

"A CYCLIST sustained injuries including a punctured lunch when he came off his bike in a collision with a car which failed to stop."

This is why news publishers need actual subeditors reading the words, not just someone lazily running a spellchecker over the text to make sure all the words exist.

"Useless gobshites" - Irish Daily Star on the deepening financial crisis

I think it's safe to say that the Irish Daily Star has abandoned all attempts at balance and objectivity in its reporting of the Irish economic situation.

This is the Northern Ireland edition, fact fans, as you can tell from the green masthead - Eire edition is a red-top. If you want somewhere to start reading about Ireland's economic (and now political) travails Marginal Revoultion is probably best. To my mind Ireland's problems share some instructive parallels with those of Greece, notably a combination of kidding themselves they were in the same Euro as Germany and a cultural failure to properly fund their government - no real surprise therefore that with those problems unresolved the crisis rolls on. Incidentally the Irish Daily Star doesn't appear to have a working website, instead returning the error message "this account has been suspended. Either the domain has been overused, or the reseller ran out of resources" - hard to say if this is a temporary glitch or a long-term situation.

(Photo submitted by my friend and presumably loyal VE reader Brian Cowe.)