Category: News

  • News Subscriptions – and the Lack of Alternatives

    News Subscriptions – and the Lack of Alternatives

    I’m a bit of a news junkie. I always have been. I read a newspaper each day – and spend a lot of time online reading lots and lots of stories from lots and lots of sites. I might regularly have 60+ Chrome tabs open on my browser full of long reads that I’m planning…

  • The Blame Game

    [Update] Private Eye sums all of this up succinctly: I’ve never watched Love Island. It’s not my kind of programme. Likewise, I don’t watch Strictly these days, and so some people in the public eye tend to slip past me. But none of that means I’m without empathy for someone who, for whatever reason, has…

  • Apple News+ and the Publishing Industry

    Apple News+ and the Publishing Industry

    In March last year, Apple bought the digital magazine service, Texture. Texture’s business model was relatively straightforward – users paid a flat monthly fee of $9.99 for access to around 200 magazines. Texture placed a layer of editorial on top of things, highlighting specific articles that you might not have otherwise discovered. Initially, the business…

  • 717s

    717s

    Great Northern, who operate the trains on my daily commute, have just introduced some brand new Class 717 rains. These have been long in the coming, but various issues have meant that they’ve come into service a few months after they were initially expected to. In fact, they’ve been running a limited service for a…

  • Things I Hate on News Sites

    I’m something of a news junkie, and I spend a lot of time reading stories on a reasonably wide range of news sites. I pay for a number of those sites, but appreciate that advertising revenues alone aren’t enough to support any sites – with the possible exception of the very largest. But there are…

  • TV News Channels – Political Pawns

    In the last few days, both Sky News and CNN have become tangentially embroiled in ongoing media takeovers. In both cases, there could be an impact on their longterm futures to a greater or lesser extent. In the UK, 21st Century Fox is trying to takeover complete ownership of BSkyB. In a response to the…

  • Problems with News Video

    Recently the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism published its annual Digital News Report, authored by Nic Newman. If you’re interested in the media, and particularly journalism in the digital age, then it’s an essential read. The report, which is supported by groups such as Google and the BBC, surveys 50,000 people across 26…

  • The New Day

    Well full marks for bravery. The New Day really is a different offering to the rest of the national news offering. It’s Trinity Mirror’s new national daily – and yet still feels a bit like a spoiler targeting the now Johnston Press owned “i” as the previous owner – the Lebadevs – take The Independent…

  • A Comment-Free 2016

    There’s no two ways about it. Comments are broken. By that I mean, commenting systems on nearly any site that drives a large amount of traffic. There are too many trolls and people with little or nothing to add. There is way too much noise, and little to no signal. I used to enjoy comments.…

  • Come on News TV – Use a Satellite!

    A couple of years ago, I moaned on this blog about the growth of streaming video in place of satellite links in news programmes. In short, as services like Skype have grown, news desks are getting their correspondents to utilise broadband or 4G and smartphones instead of sending camera crews and satellite trucks. Now this…

  • Ofcom on Audience Attitudes to Broadcast Media

    Ofcom, the UK broadcast regulator, carries out an awful lot of research, most of which it publishes on its website. But people are lazy, and they mostly just look at executive summaries and press releases. But there’s a lot more to it than that. There are often copious appendices with much more detail, and beyond…

  • News by Email

    On the one hand we keep hearing that email is dying. The young don’t use it, and anyway, we have an app for that. On the other hand it still feels pretty much impossible to do a lot of things without email. Where do your online purchase confirmations go? A myriad of apps? What if…