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.