The second Newsroom Barometer results, a survey of 700 newspaper editors senior news executives from 120 countries, was released this week. It makes for interesting reading.
Among the main results this year:
- 86% believe integrated print and online newsrooms will become the norm, and 83% believe journalists will be expected to be able to produce content for all media within five years.
- Two-thirds believe some editorial functions will be outsourced, despite frequent newsroom opposition to the practice.
- A plurality - 44% - believe on-line will be the most common platform for reading news in the future, compared with 41% last year. Thirty-one cited print (down from 35% last year), 12% mobile and 7% e-paper. The rest were unsure.
- 35% said training journalists in new media was the number one priority for investing in editorial quality. Recruiting more journalists was cited by 31%, up from 22% last year.
- A majority of editors - 56%- believe news in the future will be free, up from 48% from last year’s survey. Only one-third believe the news will remain paid for, while 11% were unsure.
- Two-thirds of respondents believe the importance of opinion and analysis pages will increase.
- A majority - 58% - think the decline in young readership is the biggest threat for the future of newspapers.
It gives me an excuse to mention a quote recently included in this blog post and which could be plastered on every wall, in every newspaper on the planet:
In case some of the mainstream media haven’t got this yet - “THE WEB DOES NOT OWE YOU A LIVING”.
It doesn’t care that you have been doing this for years, you have to earn your eyeballs like everyone else.
There was no better time than last week in which to put a lead story on your property section, explaining how to convert your cellar into living space. Well done, Sunday Business Post.
Adding a basement offers homeowners a way to add value and free up space.
We see them as dank and dingy places where you dump the suitcases after a holiday, or store mildewed maths textbooks. I once viewed a house in which the tenants had painted the word redrum (in a tribute to The Shining) over the lintel on the way down to one.
But the humble basement has become a swanky space in many London homes, with owners digging down instead of trading up in order to find more space. From the look of the interiors photographs of these high-end conversions, basement accommodation is becoming more a case of Grand Designs than Murder, She Wrote.
Well, not always…
One of Britain’s most successful new newspapers is First News, which targets the 7-14 age group. Its most recent ABCs show an average weekly sale of over 38,000, but its readership is an impressive 763,000 because one in five UK schools subscribes. There are more details about its background and its upcoming second anniversary at Roy Greenslade’s blog.
Its editorial is a mix of environmental, third-world and animal stories, and it seems to be a print version of Newsround, a programme which I still believe was the most important I ever watched, given where I’ve ended up. (Press Gang comes a close second.)
First News, though, gives us a glimpse at a market that is increasingly important for “grown-up” papers. At the Irish Times, you can see the push on the regular Cúl for Kids GAA magazines as proof of that. The myriad posters in the British press are aimed at school walls as much as general readers. Does it attract readers for life? I don’t know, but it attracts sponsorship in a thriving area, boosts circulation and means that newspaper branding gets blue-tacked onto many, many walls.
It’s clear that in the case of the apparent familicide in Wexford, the tabloids, especially, have found it easier to mirror the violence in their headlines than attempt to understand it.
It tends to be the case that when a man kills his family, and then himself, he is seen in a criminal light. Today, The Sun calls him “evil dad” and “deranged”. The Mirror also uses “deranged”. In cases where a mother kills herself and a child or children, the coverage tends to be more forgiving - “tragic mum” headlines, and such like. Mental illness, in the shape of post-natal depression, is often taken into account. But when the case involves men, the coverage is simplified and hyped. The delicacy needed in the reporting of any instance of suicide is jettisoned. They have entered the realm of the unexplainable, so they revert to what they know best: short words in big headlines and lazy adjectives.
This paper has been offering comprehensive reports and analysis of Bertie Ahern’s resignation, Brian Cowen’s ascendancy, the Mahon tribunal and important domestic and international events - and the most read story on Ireland.com for about 48 hours now? A two-day old story about the disappearance of a tragic, but relatively obscure British children’s TV presenter.
There’s a lesson in that. Somewhere.
A selection of surveys getting a mention in this morning’s Metro:
99% urge cut in drink-drive limit … Last month, advocacy group Parc (Public Against Road Carnage) surveyed more than 3,260 people in Cork, Donegal, Dublin Leitrim, Sligo, Wexford and Wicklow about attitudes towards alcohol consumption and driving
Advocacy group releases survey results which back up its position
Cheryl Cole is celebrity men least want to marry, a new poll reveals
Who commissioned this vital survey is not revealed.
Almost half of women feel good doing the washing up, according to a new survey
…carried out by those impartial people at Fairy liquid. Great big pic of their new hand model accompanies piece. (more…)
During a four-year spell as this newspaper’s TV reviewer, I would get an occasional, but forceful, sense of a subject’s displeasure.
I was once called a cretin on live radio.
A passing remark about a particularly ubiquitous Northern Irish entertainer was followed by a letter accusing me of having an anti-Northern bias. I didn’t, but I had developed an anti-ubiquitous Northern Irish entertainer bias. (more…)
The paper’s changed this morning, both in its look and with the addition today of a new photographic supplement and an extra page of opinion and analysis.
Any thoughts?
Every so often in here, we need to get a new byline picture done. Today’s that day.
It’s no fun. If you get that expression wrong, it will haunt you every time you open the paper. You don’t want to be a guffawing idiot alongside a piece about one woman’s battle against the disease that wiped out her entire family. Nor do you want to be too miserable. So, in order to find a decent medium, you aim for a half-smile, not-too-jokey, but-not-depressing contortion. Which only makes you look as if you’ve been told to “act natural” by a man pointing a gun to your head.
Besides, people never look like their byline pictures. There is a running debate among colleagues about who looks least like their byline picture. There is one reporter who would only be less like his photo if it was replaced by a picture of a small gazelle. (more…)
In Metro, with the caption: “Dublin at night with the lights off.” (Illustrating piece about environmentalists’ call for one hour of energy-saving darkness.)
Some observations from the US primaries:
- Cathal McCoille must have wanted to slap down the American chap this morning who told him on Morning Ireland that he knew a lot for an Irish man. “Hey, aren’t you a clever little leprechaun. Do a jig.” This guy had already arrived on the show by saying hello to the “emerald isle”.
- The New York Times cuts to the chase on its website and just gives its readers the results first.
- Of the many US campaign ads, this has the oddest catchline. It’s like something off a low-calorie chocolate bar (”Choconums: surprisingly moist”). Although, it would be fun to see an ad of this type on Irish television. “Willie O’Dea: surprisingly bitey.” “Enda Kenny: surprisingly evil.” etc.
Sunday Independent 23 September 2007:
O’REILLY DISMISSES GLOOM AND DOOM AS ADVERTISING ON THE UP
Gavin O’Reilly, Independent News & Media’s Chief Operating Officer, gave an upbeat presentation detailing the performance of the global media group at the half-year stage last Tuesday.
O’Reilly dismissed Ireland’s doom and gloom merchants…
Sunday Independent 20 January 2008:
THE CRASH IS COMING - Brian and Bertie Go AWOL
A writer in the Charlotte Observer, Mary C Curtis, came to Ireland for the sessions and the spuds, and heard us talk about almost nothing but US politics. Keep an eye out for a cameo by the taxi driver who, most uncharacteristically, complains about immigrants taking jobs and seems to tell her that 10 per cent of our population is Polish.
You’d think the Atlantic Ocean would be wide enough to separate an American from American politics. You would be wrong.
On an Ireland adventure with my family, I ate hot porridge for breakfast, fresh fish for dinner and more potatoes than I care to recall.
I also read about the Iowa and New Hampshire primaries and saw TV segments of the close contests in which no two European reporters pronounced Barack Obama’s name the same. (more…)
A couple of years ago, I interviewed the author Sebastian Faulks, only to discover the next day that my digital recording device had wiped the interview. Or, more likely, that I had wiped it. Either way, this was not good.
I tried to think back to what he had said. Perhaps my memory would save me from ignomy. But as I rummaged through my brain, the only things I could really remember where that, during the interview, he had used some nouns, a selection of verbs and perhaps a compound adjective. And that his hair was very impressive. (more…)
This will be the trial of the century:
Residents in some of Dublin’s leafy suburbs are taking legal action against Dublin City Council over damage caused to their cars and properties by sap exuded by council-owned trees. (more…)
I urge you to stop whatever you are doing and go and read Alexander Chancellor’s column in today’s Guardian. It is an eye-wateringly honest account of a disasterous Christmas during which his scrotum was punctured by a whippet. No, really: (more…)
The questions that Slate’s ‘Explainer’ didn’t answer this year.
Shock news: some, but not all, people Google themselves, and other people
The Onion cuts to the chase on the whole Harry Potter nonsense.
P Diddy’s perfume is called Unforgivable Woman. Rejected alternatives: “Fallen Woman” and “Harlot”.
Time may be running out. Literally.
Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert have had enough of the writers’ strike and are going back on air.
Will Smith’s next movie is I Am Legend (read the book, it’s brilliant). Then it’s a “homeless superhero” flick that’s likely to be pretty terrible.
Dublin looks very well today and this makes it look positively funky (I posted it in July, but I can show it now, so up it goes).
(more…)
Not mine, although we all make mishtakes. Not the newspaper’s, although we do have the odd glitch. But the errors of the world’s media, as compiled into one compelling (and for hacks, very scary) list by the excellent Regret The Error. Which itself has four corrections appended to the list of hilarious corrections.* Oh, the irony.
It’s Correction of the Year comes from the Independent (UK version):
Following the portrait of Tony and Cherie Blair published on 21 April in the Independent Saturday magazine, Ms Blair’s representatives have told us that she was friendly with but never had a relationship with Carole Caplin of the type suggested in the article. They want to make it clear, which we are happy to do, that Ms Blair “has never shared a shower with Ms Caplin, was not introduced to spirit guides or primal wrestling by Ms Caplin (or anyone else), and did not have her diary masterminded by Ms Caplin.”
(more…)
The BBC’s current affairs radio programme, Today, has unveiled the guest editors who will run the show during Christmas week. A show each will be edited by:
Dame Stella Rimington – former Director-General of MI5;
Damon Albarn – from the bands The Good, The Bad And The Queen, Gorillaz and Blur;
Professor Peter Hennessy – historian and author of The Secret State;
Sir Martin Evans – winner of the 2007 Nobel Prize in medicine for his work in stem cell research.
(more…)
