Posts Tagged ‘newspapers’

I had an unexpected email yesterday, from someone at the Evening Standard who’d read my take on the best british sitcoms (written in 2004) and wondered if I’d be interested in writing a few words on Gavin and Stacey winning a BAFTA and the state of sitcoms in general. Despite not exactly being an avid Standard reader, I am a fan of Gavin and Stacey, so I quickly tapped out a few paragraphs and emailed it over. I didn’t think what I wrote was particularly good (certainly less potentially libellous than my original) - writing hundreds of words is so much harder than writing thousands - but it was kind of fun seeing it in the paper today.

I know it’s best to best to cater to your audience, but sadly the short nature of the piece meant I wasn’t able to include any references to Ken Livingstone funding illegal immigrants bent on evil terrorism. Still, probably goes without saying to the average Standard reader. Anyway, thanks to Josh at the paper for including this URL in it.

On to more interesting things…. In between meetings today I managed to pop in to the British Museum to see The American Scene: Prints from Hopper to Pollock exhibition, and very good it was too. With about 150 prints covering a wide range of styles and subject matter, I thought the exhibition did an excellent job of examining American artists’ responses to the changing culture and politics in the first half of the 20th century.

Many of the images in the intervening period explore the changing urban landscape of New York, the onset of the Depression, the romanticised visions of the American heartlands by the Regionalists, the response to the rise of Fascism in Europe and America’s entry into the Second World War.

It’s on until September and admission’s free, so highly recommended if you’re in central London with a bit of time to kill.

There’s an interesting article over at Wired suggesting that the Wall Street Journal is in danger of becoming irrelevant because it charges people to view its articles online.

Because you have to subscribe to access both current news articles and the archive, the Journal is leaving only a faint footprint in cyberspace… I googled “Enron” — an issue the Journal covered exhaustively, and which two of its reporters even wrote a book about — and not one article appeared within the first 25 pages (250 results.)

…

Since most people refuse to pay for WSJ stories, most bloggers are reluctant to link to them. It also has an impact on anyone who uses the web for research — and there are a lot of us. As importantly, the next generation of readers is growing up by accessing news over the internet, and one place they are not surfing to is WSJ.com. With their habits being formed now, there is little chance the Journal will become part of their lives, either now or in the future.

I think there’s definitely something in this argument, and I wish the Independent would take note. I often buy the paper and read something that I think is worth mentioning here (I think their coverage of the Iraq war has been particularly good), but since they’ve started charging for access to lots of their articles, I usually end up instead linking to similar pieces at the Guardian, their rival, who don’t charge. I wonder, now that online advertising revenues are supposedly picking up, if the subscription model really does benefit the paper more than the expanded readership and profile that free access funded by advertising brings about. Maybe a decent compromise would be to charge for access within the first two days of an article appearing, then make it freely available after that.