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Archive: Newspapers

Anyone but the Tories?

17 October 2009 23:17

Categories: Current affairs, Edinburgh, General, Media, Newspapers, Politics, Scotland, Television, The Pod Delusion, University

This is the accompanying article / transcript to my contribution to this week’s edition of The Pod Delusion, a humorous lefty / skeptical podcast. You can listen to the full podcast below.

This year’s party conference season has now finished, and attention turns to the General Election that will held some time between now and June. What that really means is that everyone’s thoughts are turning towards the prospect of the Conservatives being in power.

Many people now seem to be treating a Conservative election win as more-or-less a foregone conclusion. This is despite the fact that they still have slightly underwhelming opinion poll ratings. The Conservatives are not exactly getting an enthusiastic reception. It’s just that the other parties are disliked even more.

Something that the Tories have going for them at the moment is the announcement a couple of weeks ago that The Sun will be endorsing them at the next General Election. Truth be told, I was surprised on the one hand that they hadn’t already announced it. On the other hand, I was surprised at how early they had announced it. After all, it gives them plenty of time to change their minds between now and the election.

The Sun tends to back a winner, even though it is probably more of a case of being a weather vane rather than any sinister string-pulling from Rupert Murdoch. A few people I have spoken to think that it’s out of order for The Sun to be advising its readers how to vote. Maybe so, but the freedom of the press is vital to our democracy and they should be allowed to put it in their paper if they wish.

Some people note that people who buy The Sun are probably not buying it for sober and authoritative political analysis. That is true. But I actually think the Conservatives are a perfect match for The Sun. David Cameron and George Osborne would look great on Page 3. They are, after all, a massive pair of tits.

Putting aside whether a tabloid endorsement is something for an aspiring government to be proud about, what should we make of a potential Conservative government? Some on the left contend that no matter how bad Labour are, the Conservatives will always be worse. I do not quite agree with that.

If you ask me, the one thing scarier than a potential Conservative victory is a potential Labour victory. After all, given the turmoil of the past few years, just imagine what Labour would think if they could get away with it all. They would probably literally think that they could get away with actual murder. The thing is that they probably would get away with a lot — more than the Conservatives would anyway.

It has become common for people to say that Labour and the Conservatives have become similar to each other as far as policy goes. I don’t really agree with that. They are quite similar, but with Labour you get bonus ID cards and biometric anal probes. All-in-all, I doubt that a Conservative government would automatically be worse than another Labour one.

The most disconcerting thing about the Tories is not that they seem particularly nasty, but that they seem pretty vacuous at the moment. It may be a cliché to say that most people don’t know what David Cameron stands for. But you do get the sense that their manifesto will resemble some backs of envelopes and cigarette packets stuck together with Sellotape.

During all the talk recently about televised leaders’ debates, David Cameron seems to be the more eager between him and Gordon Brown to appear. But you wonder quite what he will find to say. With the lack of policies, I can half imagine him responding every time he is asked a question by saying, “that’s what she said!” It will probably make about as much sense.

For a lot of people, the Tories are the enemy because they are posh. Cameron and Osborne are the notable posh figures in Westminster, though Boris Johnson also comes in for a fair bit of stick on this front.

Some Conservative politicians are indeed quite ludicrously posh. For some people, this prevents them from representing the voters of Britain adequately because they lack empathy with the man on the street. But for me, a politician’s background is irrelevant. What matters is their capability for the job.

I have to confess to having a bit of a soft spot for Boris Johnson. I need to watch what I say here. I have been told off before for having an opinion on Boris Johnson because I am not a Londoner, so in fairness it is none of my damn business.

But I did once have the opportunity to vote for Boris Johnson. That was when he attempted to become Rector of Edinburgh University when I was a student a few years ago. He was the early favourite, but an intensely negative campaign from the student politics establishment played heavily on his posh image. This ensured that Boris Johnson not only failed to win the election, but he actually came third out of four candidates.

I should point out that Boris was not my first choice in the election. My preferred option was the former Scotsman editor Magnus Linklater, who finished second.

So who did we get as Rector instead? A man called Mark Ballard. I know what you’re probably thinking: who on earth is Mark Ballard? At the time, he was a Green Member of the Scottish Parliament. However, the general population was not quite so enamoured of him as the student population was and he has since lost his seat in the Scottish Parliament.

I have actually met Mr Ballard a couple of times and I can certainly say that he is a very pleasant chap. But ultimately he is a bit of a nobody, certainly in comparison to somebody like Boris Johnson. I mean, at Edinburgh University we could have had London’s Mayor as our university’s figurehead. As it was, we got someone who was rather worthy, but rather anonymous and a bit dull.

I don’t suppose there is necessarily anything wrong with that. But the mantra of “anyone but the Tories” surely isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

3 comments

In praise of human politicians

12 September 2009 22:25

Categories: *, Current affairs, Media, Newspapers, Politics, Scotland, Sport

I see that The Scotsman has again been trying to wring another story out of a politician’s use of Twitter. This time it is Jo Swinson exposing her ignorance about football.

As she was overwhelmed by members of the Tartan Army at a railway station, Ms Swinson got out her BlackBerry, logged on to her Twitter site and wrote: “Have I missed something? What’s the football festivity? Can’t move at Queen Street station for folk in Scotland tops.”

Seven minutes later, Graham Barrie posted: “The Tartan Army v the Dutch Army tonight at Hampden Jo. You really need to get out more :) ”

Jeff and Mr Eugenides both have good takes on this. I have to agree with them. For some, football is a matter of life and death. The Scotsman‘s David Maddox calls the match “do-or-die”. But in truth, it isn’t much more than a slightly tedious playground game.

The Scotland–Netherlands tie wasn’t exactly in my diary, though it is true that I was quite aware of it thanks to my football-loving friends. My own take on the match, as published on Twitter, would probably have got me into more trouble. I wasn’t merely ignorant; I was aware, but sarcastic and dismissive:

Advice to football fans: Scotland won’t win the World Cup, so I wouldn’t concern yourself with it.

I find it difficult to get excited about football at the best of times. My enthusiasm for Scotland internationals is marginally above zilch. In my defence, I was rather put off by the fact that last month I was taken by a friend to the pub to watch what I was told would be a football match but turned out to be a disaster film. Strange.

Really, you could argue that the people who don’t think about football are making the right decision. All that worrying over whether Scotland gets knocked out in this round or that does seem to be a waste of energy. And I can well imagine Jo Swinson has plenty of other things to occupy her time with.

This comes just a few months after Patrick Harvie was at the centre of another Twitter row manufactured by David Maddox. His crime was to discreetly tweet at the dinner table, something which I think many people do.

I don’t get this obsession with politicians having to be identikit robots who all have to be up-to-date on the price of milk, whatever music is in the charts and some tedious sporting exploit. I have written about this phenomenon before, and my views haven’t changed.

The fact is that there are 646 MPs and 129 MSPs. If you took 775 random people, you can be guaranteed to find people who couldn’t give two hoots about football and couldn’t tell you how much a loaf of bread costs. You would certainly find plenty of people who didn’t feel the need to contrive odd opinions about the Arctic Monkeys. Yet we expect all this from our politicians. Why?

On the one hand people criticise politicians for being almost like robots if they are perceived to toe the party line, talk in soundbites or reel off reams of irrelevant statistics. But then if they reveal a bit of their personality by representing part of the variety of society by not fitting a media-constructed template of what a “normal person” is expected to be, they are blasted for being “out of touch”.

I can more easily admire Jo Swinson for her personal choice not to worry about football than any politician who feels the need to pretend they are interested when they are so clearly not. Indeed, Jeff’s comparison with Gordon Brown’s uneasy comments about Paul Gascoigne’s goal against Scotland in Euro 96 reveals that this is one of those issues where you’re damned if you do and you’re damned if you don’t.

While you would expect parliamentarians to have a knowledge of certain things in order to do their job, there’s nothing wrong with them being human when it comes to their personal interests. In cases like this, it is those in the media who seem more out of touch.

2 comments

How charging for online content might work

14 August 2009 13:50

Categories: *, Blogging, Current affairs, Economics, Internet, Media, Newspapers, Scotland, Technology

Charged debate

A series of posts

  1. Are newspapers ready to charge for online content?
  2. How charging for online content might work

In my previous article, I argued that the problems that are hitting journalism are more to do with the quality of the content than with the fact that it’s difficult to charge for content these days. “Why pay to read Telegraph Digg-bait when you can read BBC churnalism for free?”, I asked.

I am sure plenty of journalists realise this if they stop to think about the situation. The fact that so many professionals blame bloggers for the industry’s ills says it all. Despite journalists’ qualifications, experience and resources, their entire business is supposedly being dismantled by a bunch of hobbyists who spend the odd hour of their spare time opining on the internet.

A few weeks ago I met a journalist at a party and I engaged him in a conversation about the future of his industry. He told me he hates bloggers (whoops! — I kept schtoom). But he told me that in his view the biggest problem was people scooping him on web forums! If the professionals see online discussion forums as not only competing with them but doing better than them, that surely must make them wonder if the product they are asking people to buy simply is not good enough.

Anyone who thinks that bloggers and the mainstream media are competing is wrong. If they are competing, the media simply isn’t doing its job properly. Let us face facts. For the most part, bloggers don’t have the contacts, the resources or the expertise to do, for instance, a big investigative story.

If the media is worried about amateur bloggers, it is a pretty bad reflection on the professionals. Perhaps to distinguish itself, the media should be focussing on those aspects of content production that bloggers cannot do.

The supply of mediocre content is too high. Too much of the same sort of content is as readily available to news junkies as sea water is to beach-goers. In effect, for the past decade or so newspapers have been driving up to the beach with a tankful of sea water, then pumping their water into the sea. Later they started stretching out their hands like beggars wondering, “why won’t these beach-goers pay us for all this seawater we’re providing them?!”

So what is the answer? In my view, less is more. What newspapers need to do is offer something distinctive and different. They should specialise more and differentiate their content from everyone else’s. They need to offer less, but better, content.

Newspapers should forget about reporting all the same hard news as every other outlet is. It is a crowded marketplace so there is no money to be made there. Instead, they should work on more exclusives, investigative reporting, analysis and features.

Actually, there is a problem with that idea, which is that it won’t save all newspapers as we know them at all. It points to a future where many daily newspapers may wither. But weeklies, monthlies and specialist publications are more likely to thrive. It wouldn’t stop the press from having a difficult period of job losses and paper closures. But it would mean those who could get it right would be able to charge for content quite comfortably.

Evidence suggests that this shift may already be happening. Speaking personally, there is not one daily newspaper that I would be happy to pay for. But up until recently I was perfectly happy to pay for the weekly Economist (and in truth, I only stopped because I didn’t have the time to read it). As for specialist publications, I still like to read the monthly F1 Racing if I get the chance.

It may be the same for other people too. Recent evidence seems to suggest that many specialist publications are doing well at the moment, even amid all the turmoil in the press and the worst recession in living memory. According to Malcolm Coles, 216,000 people are perfectly happy to pay £7.75 per month for an online subscription to Which?.

Yesterday I also read about two major news websites relaunching — with less emphasis on news. On the new LA Times website, Hamilton Nolan at Gawker wrote:

Scroll down from the top of page at the new LAT site and you find: Health, Food, Education, Technology, Sports, Blogs, Columns, Opinion, Photos & Video, Summer Hot List, and “Your Scene, Your Comments.” Did you miss the, say, ‘International news’ section? It is way up at the top in tiny tiny type. Below the top fifth or so of the page, there is no “hard news” at all.

As for the new Newsday website… well, just take a look.

Someone still has to do the worthy news stories though. Maybe that can be better left to agencies or major broadcasters. But maybe a simple reduction in the number of newspapers would suffice. Iain Hepburn recently estimated that as many as 17 major media outlets are all aiming at the same audience in Scotland. We make do without 17 major supermarket chains — five or six different ones satisfy most consumers. So do we need more than five or six major news outlets?

A merger here, a takeover there and even the odd shutdown or two might be a good thing. Fewer outlets can have a higher market share, more resources, more of the best journalists — and they’ll produce a better product as a result. Five or six excellent news sources would be much better than 17 so-so ones, which is more or less what we’ve got at the moment. Surely that is what’s needed to make news a viable business going forward.

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Are newspapers ready to charge for online content?

14 August 2009 01:41

Categories: Blogging, Books, Current affairs, Economics, Entertainment, Internet, Media, Music, Newspapers, Technology

Charged debate

A series of posts

  1. Are newspapers ready to charge for online content?
  2. How charging for online content might work

Rupert Murdoch’s decision to experiment with charging for content has ruffled a few feathers. Fair play to Murdoch for being brave enough to put his head above the parapet. If anyone can take the risk, it’s Murdoch — and the rest of the media will have him to thank if the gamble pays off and it reveals the business model that other outlets can follow. Malcolm Coles certainly makes a fairly good case to suggest that Murdoch can get away with it.

Without doubt, monetising content online has been a very tough nut to crack, so much so that many appear almost to have given up. Indeed, the controversy surrounding Murdoch’s decision shows just how much some people now believe that it is impossible to charge for content.

No doubt the advent of the web has changed the game. It is much more difficult to charge for something that doesn’t physically exist, and something which can very easily be distributed for almost zero cost. This more or less means that, if you want to, you can probably get it for free.

I know of one major national newspaper that found that having a paywall was detrimental to their business because they made more money by removing the paywall and instead displaying Google ads to the extra readers. Anyone who has used Google ads will know that we are talking about pretty low amounts here. It is a real demonstration that a simple subscription model will not work for everyone.

But we know that there are plenty of people who are willing to pay for content. As Malcolm Coles points out, there are countless examples of people paying for music, audiobooks and whatever else, when they could have got it for free. That is because, contrary to what many people assume, most humans have a conscience.

For instance, the pay-what-you-like or “honesty box” model actually seems to work. There is the example popularised by Freakonomics about the bagel man. Radiohead seemed to make it work when they released In Rainbows.

Just last week I heard an interview with a taxi driver from Vermont, USA who invites all of his customers to pay what they like. “Nobody has shortchanged me yet,” he says. Even in cases where cash payment was not forthcoming, payment in the form of CDs was.

The problem is, you won’t be able to charge anyone anything if you only serve up a pile of samey crap. Your product needs to be distinctive. The bagel man wouldn’t have done so well if he was trying to sell pens. Radiohead made it work because they are the best band in the world with a loyal fanbase.

But how many media outlets can offer something so attractive? The problem as I see it is not that you cannot monetise any content. The problem is that the content newspapers are producing just now is not the sort of content they can get away with charging for.

Jeff has suggested that there needs to be a sense of duty to buy newspapers, just like there is a sense of duty to vote. But people should only really pay for something that they value, otherwise inefficiencies will result.

If people still value newspapers, they should be willing to pay — and many still are. Most people would feel guilty otherwise, as the honesty box examples suggest. But the problem is that many people just don’t like newspapers any more, as is evident in the comments on Jeff’s post.

It is not as if there is anything wrong with the physical product, despite the jibe about newspapers being “dead trees”. I can imagine a parallel universe where the newspaper was invented after the internet, where the physical paper would be seen as a luxury item. You don’t have to be connected to the internet. You can fold it up and carry it about with you. You can scribble on it if you want to. You can frame it if you love it enough.

But the problem is with the content. With the advent of new technologies, newspapers have become much less useful to consumers. Once, newspapers were almost the only way to find out about the news. Today they are the slowest of many ways to find out the news.

How many times does a major story break late in the day? That story will be all over the breakfast radio and all over the 24 hour news channels. There will be countless reports about it on the internet, and to add insult to injury the bloggers will have had their say too. But if you want to read it in the newspaper, you will have to wait until tomorrow.

Maybe a major story doesn’t break so late very often. But even in these cases, the chances are that you have had ample chance to hear analysis about the front page stories on the radio or the television the night before. In essence, newspapers now do little more than peddle what is literally yesterday’s news.

Like the music industry, the newspaper industry’s mistake was to fail to adapt. They arrogantly assumed that they could carry on with the same template and tinker round the edges, fumbling around for a business model that would work.

Of course, most newspapers have websites these days. But if anything, that has exacerbated the problem. It has led to phenomena like churnalism, with journalists producing more and more content with fewer and fewer resources. As such, much of newspaper websites’ content is watered-down crap. Worse still, much of it is Digg-bait which has been SEOed to death.

That is the crux of the matter. The media is sullied, and journalism as a profession is held in contempt by much of the general public. No wonder people won’t pay for content — it’s not any good, and there is nothing to distinguish it from free alternatives. Why pay to read Telegraph Digg-bait when you can read BBC churnalism for free?

So is there a solution? Keep an eye out for my next article where I will put forward a few suggestions.

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The failing economy of Kirkcaldy

5 August 2009 20:54

Categories: *, Current affairs, Economics, Famous Langtonians, Fife, General, Media, Newspapers, Personal, Politics, Scotland, Work

It was revealed yesterday that Gordon Brown will spend part of his summer doing voluntary work in Kirkcaldy, the town where he grew up which forms the major part of his constituency of Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath. It is also my home town.

Some uncharitable people have suggested that his job may involve digging holes, something he has done quite enough of as Prime Minister. More cutting might be the observation that voluntary work is the only sort of work you’ll be able to find in Kirkcaldy.

A couple of weeks ago, The Times ran a piece about the economic woes which have hit Kirkcaldy which was a talking point among some of my friends. Aside from apparently inventing the demonym “Kirkcaldians” (I personally prefer “Langtonian”, named after the town’s old nickname, the Lang Toun), I think the article is largely a fair and accurate reflection of the town.

I have written before about the sorry state of the Mercat, the town’s main shopping centre which used to house my former workplace, Woolworths. Over the difficult Christmas period the Mercat went from bad to worse. But it gets just a passing mention in the Times piece, with its mere eight or more empty units.

Apparently there are thirty empty units in the High Street. There is a particularly dire section in the middle of the pedestrianised zone, where three shops in a row — which used to be the Link, Adams and Icon Clothing — now lie empty. What remains has been criticised for exhibiting the characteristics of a clone town (PDF link). Beyond that, particularly in the west end, what isn’t a chain store is most likely a pawn shop or a charity shop.

Perhaps this is not particularly unusual. The death of the High Street has been widely advertised, so this is not a problem unique to Kirkcaldy. The Times article briefly touches on the retail park. It sits on the north-western edge of the town, well away from the centre. But it is currently being expanded, a development which feels like a desperately-needed shot in the arm for Kirkcaldy.

The problem is that it just is not enough. Indeed, the clamour over the few new jobs that are available serve to bring into focus just how dire the situation is. I have lost count of the number of people that I know of applying for the same few jobs.

A new B&Q has opened, although the old one closed. A number of my former colleagues at Woolworths have ended up working there. PC World is another new store at the retail park. But so many people I know applied for jobs there. A friend who got an interview there was told that they had been bombarded with over 700 applications.

If you got rejected by PC World, you could always try applying for a job at the new Toys R Us. The only problem is that they apparently had 3,000 applications. Only a lucky 350 got an interview, with just 40 places going.

An Argos Extra has also opened up. They held an assessment day at the Jobcentre a couple of months ago. I saw it with my own eyes as I walked past it. There were two queues coming out of the Jobcentre, one in each direction. I have been told that the larger of the two queues stretched all the way to the police station, which sits at the opposite end of a street which is the best part of 200 yards long.

The store has been open for just over a week now. The good news on that front is that my friend, who transferred to work there from the existing High Street store, reports that sales have been very encouraging. Whether that is simply down to the excitement of something new opening in Kirkcaldy remains to be seen.

As for the Jobcentre itself, that continues to hire new people, including one of my friends. What they’ll do with the new staff when demand for the Jobecentre’s services is not so strong is unclear. But at the moment that feels like a distant possibility anyway. Whenever I went there I was often told they were short staffed.

In the Times article, there is a quote about the Jobcentre by a man called Tam Collins: “they expect you to stack shelves at Asda.” I got exactly that when I visited the Jobcentre. Going there is a fruitless task which I have now given up.

The Asda is a new store which has opened up in neighbouring Glenrothes. It is probably the most exciting thing in terms of employment to happen in Glenrothes for years. That is another place where a few of my former Woolworths colleagues have ended up. In a way they were lucky — Asda received over 7,000 applications for that one store.

Meanwhile, the town’s largest employer, a call centre called MGt, has recently shed 65 jobs as a result of the closure of Setanta. 65 looks like a small number compared to the amount that are already looking for work. But MGt has provided a lifeline to Kirkcaldy in terms of employment since it set up around a decade ago. Today it has around 1,000 people on its books. I dread to think what Kirkcaldy would be like if it wasn’t for MGt. That even MGt is downsizing is ominous.

But that sums up Kirkcaldy. It lost its way after the industrial decline of the previous fifty years. Now if you want a job in Kirkcaldy you need to either work in a call centre or in the precarious retail sector. And even then, good luck to you. After my previous experience of working in retail, I am avoiding it if at all possible.

Seven months since losing my job at Woolworths, and over a year since I graduated, I still haven’t found a full time job (although I’m lucky to have found bits and pieces of freelance work). I have well and truly hit the buffers, and I am now starting with a blank sheet of paper to decide on my next move.

One of my biggest mistakes was to focus my search too narrowly on a small geographical area. I certainly didn’t bet on finding a job in Kirkcaldy — it was bad enough before and clearly getting worse. But I planned on finding something in the eastern part of the central belt — somewhere within an area encompassing Fife, Dundee, Perth, Stirling or of course Edinburgh. No luck yet. I will have to broaden my search further and hope that something comes up, or hope that I will be able to rely on freelance work in the long term. I wouldn’t like to bet on relying on getting a job at a call centre in Kirkcaldy.

It is sad that Kirkcaldy is like this. This is the town of Adam Smith, the father of modern economics who looked out onto the bustling Firth of Forth, full of trade ships, and was thereby inspired to investigate sources of wealth. Today he would only be inspired to investigate the weed growth in the derelict former workplaces.

Sadder is the role of Gordon Brown. Surely, some people say, if there was one man who could save Kirkcaldy, it would be the Prime Minister and former Chancellor, who grew up here and depends on the residents’ votes. Some are truly furious about it.

Others, as the Times article notes, inexplicably give him and the government the benefit of the doubt. Talking to people, it is genuinely true that there are people in Kirkcaldy who believe that Gordon Brown is a competent leader who has somehow been stitched up. Even for failed leaders, the halo effect is still in evidence.

That is the irony. The people of Kirkcaldy are probably the one set of voters in the country that Gordon Brown can afford to take for granted. Could it be that having the local man as Prime Minister has exacerbated Kirkcaldy’s problems?

It would indeed be harsh to lay the blame wholly at Gordon Brown’s door. Kirkcaldy had problems before, and most of what has happened in the past year can be put down to the global recession.

But the Labour Party is supposed to look after the interests of people who live and work in towns just like Kirkcaldy — a former industrial town that slips ever-further into the mire, with one of the highest unemployment rates in the country. On the evidence I see with my own eyes, the Labour Party have failed us.

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