Where's the money coming from?

An interesting week in press terms.

As the Guardian announces that it will soon have a ‘digital first’ strategy (http://tinyurl.com/62l4tpa), the Northclife group turns a second of its provincial daily papers into a weekly (http://tinyurl.com/6fjktpc).

Fifteen or twenty years ago the people who run the big newspaper groups could see it going this way. The bit they didn’t foresee was how much of their revenue was going to disappear as online took over from print.

Their hope was that as newspaper sales declined, the whole business would gently migrate online – which would be an even better business than print because you wouldn’t have to spend money printing things and distributing them…

But they have not found a way, online, to extract from advertisers anything like the money they were used to getting for ads on the printed page. Or to get online readers to pay to read the product. And that is the whole ongoing issue, in a nutshell. They are accustomed to making very healthy profits. But now... where's the money going to come from?

Politeness is... being polite

These people who put little signs on the road outside their houses saying ‘Polite notice: no parking’: if it’s so polite, why do they never say please?

And would it be pedantic to point out that the use of 'polite' in this context is inappropriate anyway, because there is nothing polite about assertion of control over a space to which you have no claim?

‘Impertinent notice: no parking’ would make more sense, but this would probably not be explainable to the author of the sign.

As for those people who stick ‘No turning’ notices at the space at the end of their driveway: one can only hope that they will continue to prompt all right-thinking people to use these spaces for turning whenever they have the opportunity, even when there is no obvious reason to be doing any turning.

The wheels come off

Now and again something comes along which is capable of entirely changing your perspective.

I, like many others, conceived of media studies as a course of study which was probably not all that challenging. But it seems there is such as thing as a course in motoring journalism, run by the appropriately-named University for the Creative Arts in Farnham.

Well there was; it seems it has now been chopped: http://t.co/VBYjxzn. Also the course in leisure journalism, which sounds even better.

All this makes media studies look like, well, something jolly impressive. But I’m not sure I’m going to take all this information at face value. It has the feel of something that has got left over from April 1.

Don't call me.... let's see if it works

After my recent rant about junk calls, I now know about the Telephone Preference Service. Thanks, Anne-Marie Simpson.

For anyone as ignorant as me, it can be found at http://www.mpsonline.org.uk/tps/

Having signed up to that, I trust that it will filter out all the crap. All I will have to be irritated about then is the answerphone itself. I’m increasingly irritated by the tone it is taking.

When there had been no calls it used to say ‘You have NO messages’. Now it says ‘You don’t have ANY messages’ in an even more contemptuous manner. And there’s no way I can respond. It makes you want to track down the person who made the recording and say: ‘Do you really think I’m worried? I couldn’t sodding well care less. I LIKE having no messages actually…’

How pleased I am you called

I have never had much inclination towards violence, but if I could get hold of the gentleman who keeps leaving messages which start ‘Please don’t hang up, this is a public information message’ and goes on to try to flog me a way of cancelling credit card debts I would punch him up the throat.

The most irritating thing about automated messages is the fact that you can’t respond to them. I have heard the actor trying to tell me about how I can get out of my (assumed) debts about two dozen times now, but he will never hear my cheery response. Even so, I can’t resist telling him how I feel about him before I smash the phone down.

Legislation ought to be introduced to force any company putting out junk messages to include the home phone number of the person who has made the recording. That would put a stop to the whole thing pretty fast.

Keep it real

Nice item from South West News the other day, spoiled only by the needless insertion of the word huge: http://dlvr.it/GwP39

Apart from the fact that this sort of adjectivalising is irritating in a news story, the thing isn’t massive – it’s a pretty modest size for a fridge freezer.

Aspiring reporters please note. Also remember: for a cheap laugh, it’s often worth soliciting comments from the police because they can be so twattish.

PS: Fair play to this bloke, I say, for transporting his domestic appliances withut the use of fossil fuels. Let's see more of it.

My own efforts in this area are pathetic by comparison - limited to sticking a skateboard under the fridge/freezer/washing machine when it needs moving from room to room or garage to house. It does work really well though; you can steer it, apart from anything else.

Data runs wild

It seems the age of gathering information is at an end. It just doesn’t sound sufficiently 'business speak'-like, even for people you wouldn’t expect to be immersed in business bullshit.

This morning on the radio the British High Commissioner in New Zealand said officials were 'capturing data' about UK citizens who might have been caught up in the earthquake.

Regrettably for the English news media, no data about fatalities or serious injuries to British nationals seems so far to have been captured.

Yes we can

Some expressions don’t stand the test of time because of changing technology.

“You can’t put toothpaste back in the tube”, for instance. That dates from the days when it came tin tubes (well, it was probably not tin but an alloy, I expect).

With plastic tubes, you can reintroduce a certain amount of toothpaste. It is only necessary to squeeze the tube in such a way as to create a potential vacuum, drawing the unrequired toothpaste back in.

I think it's important that people know this. Otherwise, having heard people say "You can't put toothpaste back in the tube", they might needlessly be discouraged from attempting so to do. There's too much negativity around.

Bookmark this just in case...

You can go looking for anything you need online these days, and sometimes you find really useful info just by accident.

Here are some top tips I gleaned on several topics (don’t give me a bad time about spelling, grammar etc – these excerpts are a straightforward cut and paste job):

Piles
One in every three households is looking for the best hemorrhoid home treatment to cure their condition. The symptoms are no laughing topic.
Make sure to drink lots of liquid, at least six glasses throughout the day. This is essential when increasing your fiber diet which has a tendency to puff up and absorb a lot of moisture. Include caffeine-free beverages as well as whole fruit and vegetable juices as part of your liquid intake. Softer solid wastes make it easier to eradicate your bowels.

Chicken coops
Folks possess a misconception which building hen coops is really a challenging job. For many people, creating a chicken coop is actually too difficult. It's an agreeable proven fact that chicken coop creation is not easy. Nevertheless, with the correct Plans for chicken coops as well as right resources, anyone may become an expert within chicken coop building.

Success with women
While going out on dates, be a gents, open the door for her and keep your attention on her. One rule to ALWAYS follow when on a date, never stare at other women when you are on dates. This will convince a girl that you are a player and she will eliminate you at the end.
I will leave you with one of my best secrets and techniques on how to convince a girl and keep her coming back to you. After a couple dates, shock your girl by taking her to get here feet and nails done.

All these from a website called SANE PR, a title which on this evidence seems to be a bit of a misnomer.

Luxury I can't afford

It's no secret that I like a glass of wine, and that I have been known to cross the threshold of Majestic from time to time.

The Majestic connection is the only thing I can think of that might explain why the postman has delivered me a fat glossy brochure from a company called Spiral Cellars, who specialise in coming to your home, excavating a large hole in the floor and installing a lavish mini-cellar with spiral staircase, accessed by a large glass (or wood) hatch in the floor which will certainly impress your friends. It is designed to hold (by my standards, anyway) quite a large number of bottles.

I say large, but everything's relative, obviously. The smallest cellar in the range holds 650 bottles, which may not be a huge number but comfortably exceeds the largest total routinely to be found in our garage - maybe 20 or 25. I can appreciate the convenience, though. As one happy customer testimonialises:

"We used to keep our wine in a temperature-controlled warehouse. It became hard work always having to think ahead about what wine to have delivered to the house to drink in the short term, and in quantities of full cases. Now I have everything in one place, and a wine for every occasion to hand. What's more, the money I save on warehousing and deliveries means I have more to spend on wine."

The money saved might also, of course, help you to partially recoup the cost of the project, which appears to be upwards of £15,000 or so. How quickly the effect of the saving might be felt would obviously depend on your household's consumption of wine. Of course getting through the amount required to make a truly significant saving might leave you struggling to assess what the saving might be - or to get to a handle on anything else, for that matter.

I don't think I can afford to be taking this idea up. I mean, the suggestion is already offered in this household, from time to time, that I appear to be an alcoholic. What assessment of my character might result from a decision to go in for one of these?

If you can afford it: http://www.spiralcellars.com/

Carry On: Mind My Meat And Two Veg

The time is out of joint...

Anyone who had the feeling that the humour of the Carry On films was a bit, well, prehistoric will have had their suspicions confirmed by this image of Neanderthal man which seems to indicate almost a direct line to the late Sid James.

The meat and two veg headline which which reinforced the Carry On connection made it almost too neat to be true. It has all the characteristics of an April 1 offering which accidentally got out too soon. Which, on reflection, has all the logic.

The only other explanation could be that, with the research having gone on at an American institution, all those concerned were not familiar with the Carry On oeuvre and so failed to spot, as their portrait took shape, that a cinema icon had somehow made an uncanny appearance. That can't be likely, though, surely?

http://tinyurl.com/26xhfwf