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politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » Print journalism needs a revolution to avoid a slow death: micro-payments are the way forward
When did you last buy a newspaper? I’ve no idea when I did. It was certainly before this year and then will have been the local weekly; I haven’t bought a national paper in years – why would you? I do subscribe to a hard-copy weekly magazine (which also brings with it online access to their articles), but that’s a different thing
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I do have subscriptions to a couple of favoured journals and am a paying supporter of The Guardian. There are many more that I never read because of payrolls.
Re: previous thread and line of “murder or manslaughter, what matters is the sentence”.
Isn’t one of the issues that the judge’s sentence is just the start - the crime they are convicted of is likely to have a big impact on the likelihood and terms of future parole?
They are now eye-wateringly expensive. Printed in London, dragged overnight nearly 250 miles, the various inserts laboriously put together with the main paper at the newsagent/shop/garage....all to get something that technolgy can instantly ping to your lap-top or ipad or (God forbid for the nation's eyesight) your phone.
Mr. WIlliiam Caxton, move aside, your work is done. Get over it, wifey.
Sky Sports is the obvious comparison. They now do a one day pass - but that is £9.99 (v a monthly subscription of c.£35 - though, how much the average customer pays varies and, of course, you need a base subscription for Sky or Virgin).
The point is, more money can be made by charging a lot to those who are really keen to pay for something than by getting more customers at a lower price.
You could do something similar for accuracy: Papers probably do actually want to write accurate stuff, but they have to balance that against the need for clicks. So have a rating system later on after more evidence is in - either a panel of experts or a jury of users - and have that direct some of the payments away from the publishers of articles that turned out to be shitty, and towards ones that turned out to be good.
Surely PayPal already exists?
As for non-politicians, especially thick ones, like Cummings, who thinks facts are unimportant...
Hard to know what those people will do with themselves, it seems before long we'll all either work for the state or Amazon
Guardian for example went from losing £100k a day a decade ago to breaking even in 2019, their model already works fine for them, and works for customers too.
The final word isn’t with the Attorney General but the Court of Appeal.
https://www.gov.uk/ask-crown-court-sentence-review
Provenance, facts and longer form content are in shorter supply.
The option of a life sentence is open to the judge. Let’s see if it gets taken before we start talking about what happens next.
But isn’t it slightly ironic that Tony Blair’s attempts to separate the judiciary and the legislature (like most of his constitutional reforms, half baked, based on a lack of understanding of how the system worked and designed more to showcase Tone’s greatness than to correct a fault) seem to have had the opposite effect?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/07/24/substack-email-newsletter-journalism/
https://substack.com/
https://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/barney-coyle-guildford-manslaughter-killer-17777862
Edit - and in that case, the sentence was increased:
https://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/guildford-manslaughter-barney-coyle-jail-17949073
Incidentally, with a case like that to go on as part of a sentencing guideline, the judge is going to have a hard time justifying less than ten years in this altogether more shocking case.
Every post you make requires a 1c bet on Hillary Clinton to be next US President on Betfair. I will be requiring screenshots of positions to match post numbers. I will, of course, be taking the other side of the bets.
There is another reason why the print newspapers are dying. Like far too many members of the PB community their opinions are irrelevant outside London. Would the Guardian have survived this long if it wasn't the darling of the public sector. Take away all the publicly funded subscriptions by councils etc and how many readers outside London would it have?
I tend to look to SKY News. Invariably they have a man or woman on the scene when the BBC is still talking about some utterly trivial media darling.
One thing Covid-19 has shown only too clearly is how badly the London media circus is struggling to come to terms with the fact that in most aspects of ordinary daily life, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are foreign countries to England and therefore the output of the London-centric media offers little. Why would I care about whether people in London are wearing facemasks in shops since Friday? We have been doing it in Scotland for a fortnight. Why should I be interested in whether or not English schools will return to "normal" in September? The Scottish schools are due to return in a little over 2 weeks time. Two of an increasing list of topics where the London print media is irrelevant to the roughly 10 million people who aren't English but inhabit these islands.
Not so long ago the Home Secretary had the power to increase sentences but that power was pretty much taken away from politicians when a case was brought against Michael Howard.
Via work I get access to the FT, Bloomberg, and the Wall Street Journal.
It works well for me, and I'm not keen on micro payments as it might lead to click bait.
I do think Apple's approach (or something similar might be the way to go.)
UK Subscribers to Enjoy Personalised, Comprehensive Access to Over 150 Publications Within Apple News for £9.99 a month.
https://www.apple.com/uk/newsroom/2019/09/apple-launches-apple-news-plus-in-the-uk/
If I were giving up publications, I would lose the LA Times first, the FT second, the Washington Post third, my children fourth, and the NY Times Cooking site fifth.
https://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/conference/2007/09/labour-majority-increase
One of the last things I saw on ITV News was the incredulity of two men not much older than me discussing how much time people spend watching Youtube.
I used to watch the news when I ate lunch. It grew increasingly tedious and I stopped. Now I watch history or videogame stuff on Youtube. And it's been surprising how little I miss the news, which I also used to watch at 10pm and now don't. Occasionally catch little bits of Outside Source, which can be interesting, but the lack of straight down the line objectivity as epitomised by the regurgitations and rambling of Peston or the terrible important opinions of Emily Maitlis don't exactly encourage me to watch more.
Meanwhile, Andrew Neil appears to be overlooked.
On the papers front: subscriptions are surely the way to go. It works for independent creators via Patreon, no reason it can't work for a paper that people actually want to read.
On the subject of the NYT, I assume you don't cook.
It seems like an old-fashioned system in today's world, but anything in print seems old-fashioned these days. I don't think that the print editions can be replaced with an online version as if this would be exactly equivalent. With a printed paper you can just turn the pages and be surprised by the contents. With an online newspaper you tend to find only what you are looking for. With a print newspaper you have a permanent record that will still be there in 100 years’ time in a reference library. What permanent record is there of an online newspaper that is behind a paywall? I do hope that the print newspapers survive.
i have been buying less frequently in 2020 due to the domination of news about covid -19 and depressing pictures of people in face masks in many an edition. I buy when I feel optimistic about the world and think papers would sell more if they shifted to more positive stories
https://twitter.com/Rasmussen_Poll/status/1286778563048480768?s=20
https://twitter.com/Politics_Polls/status/1286811627803889667?s=20
(If composing such a post, I might also have mentioned the globalisation of this industry, eg that readership of the New York Times etc has shot through the roof in England.)
I don't need any news subscriptions because I just read all Scott's tweets on here.
We will sorely miss them when they are gone.
The Court of Appeal has no power to then lower sentences only increase them.
Plus Parliament is sovereign not judges anyway and the Tories have a majority of 80 and Boris and Cummings can thus amend the law including retrospectively whatever the Appeal Court thinks
The murder of the Scotsman (thanks Andrew Neil) and the Herald by forces outwith Scotland is a national tragedy, and their loss is still profoundly felt. Our country needs new high-quality media to accurately and honestly report to our nation.
Even if Boris and Dom turn the UK into a MadMax post-apocalyptic waste land after Coronavirus and Brexit, all they have to do is trawl this case up. If Boris were to don the black cap for these three, he would get my vote, and I am wholly opposed to capital punishment.
These three feral animals deserve the same fate they meted out to PC Harper
The Guardian and Times now have their crosswords on their apps, but it is not the same.
No one need look further than PB for up to the minute developments. I first learned of the deaths of Stirling Moss and Vera Lynn on PB along with Ghislaine Maxwell's arrest and Jeffrey Epstein's demise. An AP or Reuters wire feed arrives on PB a second or two after release.
I actually didn't know about the Cooking subscription.
BBC Good Food (with ratings check) has never let me down. I copy the really good ones into a recipe notebook so I can look back.
I don't love cooking from a screen. I have the memory of a goldfish when it comes to recipes and need to recheck over and over again.
Mind you, I still read hard copy books, so I must be a real dinosaur.
The newspapers i find have maybe 1 or 2 journalists with original ideas that are worth reading .Those journalists (Simon Jenkins ,Richard Littlejohn,John Gray etc) i might pay to read.
I subscribe to a recently launched monthly magazine called 'The Critic' which i would recommend.It fills in a gap in the market for interesting contrarian views.The Critic has a website.
I get nearly all world media, including most UK titles, absolutely free on PressReader, which comes free with my Swedish library card. (Including Viz incidentally, but I still pay a subscription cos I love the real paper object.)
I miss The Economist and Private Eye from PressReader, but I just get the paper The Economist free when I’m at the main city centre library, and I buy the Private Eye when I’m visiting England or Scotland.
- the Labour Opposition's denial that Thatcherism had democratic legitimacy in Scotland, which undermined the legitimacy of the Union
- the Labour Governmnent granting devolution, which created an alternative power centre in Edinburgh, while not creating a fully federal UK, so the structure always looked half-baked
- the fact that, whatever one thinks of their record in government, the SNP have had two of the most skilful political leaders of my lifetime in Alex Salmond and Nicola Sturgeon.
A fourth might be the Brexit referendum, but I'm not so convinced that's led to an Indy surge.
The same is true of the guardian and the financial times.
(Agree re Brexit referendum: effect thus far remarkably tiny. But please note that we’re not out yet!)
Never start going out with someone just before their birthday. Having to fork out on a present early in a relationship is a bit much.
This is why people ask 'What's your star sign?' - then walk away if they give the one just about to start!
Anyhow, I hope it turns up and you both have a great day.
Labour actually increased its vote in 2010 in Scotland under Gordon Brown.
Just seeing the dreadful pictures on Sky from Portland as near civil war erupts on the streets
The US is self destructing
On micropayments, that won't ever work. What will change is newspapers are going to pimp themselves out to affiliate marketing a lot more. The Daily Mail already does this extremely successfully with their sidebar of shame which exists to generate click-through revenue. How Guardian readers will feel about being sold bikinis and tanning oil with faux reviews and "articles" about Meghan isn't clear...
Example:
Skyline R33 GTR Coupe = £25,000 classic
Skyline R33 GTR Sedan=The value of the drivetrain to make an R33 GTS Coupe into a £15000 GTR Coupe replica.
P.S. Way off topic!
It brings no credit on our party
Some information -- or is it mere speculation? -- about the background checks may have leaked into the betting market, as Michelle Lujan Grisham and Stacey Abrams moved markedly out on Betfair a couple of days back. Susan Rice was 20/1 last month, Karen Bass 20/1 as recently as last week.