Author Topic: Newspapers: Decline and fall or renaissance?  (Read 21536 times)

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Offline Ian

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Newspapers: Decline and fall or renaissance?
« on: July 23, 2013, 06:49:53 pm »

Local papers are all struggling at the moment, while County councils can apparently produce glossy newspapers at will. Do we need newspapers and what is happening to news in general?
Nothing is so firmly believed as that which we least know.  ― Michel de Montaigne

Si hoc legere scis, nimis eruditionis habes.

Offline Ian

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Re: Newspapers: Decline and fall or renaissance?
« Reply #1 on: July 23, 2013, 06:52:35 pm »
We know our local papers are being cut to the bone, but the news that Ofcom is letting ITV broadcast far less local news from its next licence renewal marks a major shift in news provision. This article make for fascinating reading:

http://www.pressgazette.co.uk/content/council-newspaper-journalist-hits-back-we-all-work-same-industry-lets-stick-together
Nothing is so firmly believed as that which we least know.  ― Michel de Montaigne

Si hoc legere scis, nimis eruditionis habes.


Offline Ian

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Re: Newspapers: Decline and fall or renaissance?
« Reply #2 on: August 10, 2013, 06:24:49 pm »
This is worth reading. It has some expletives in, which the censored words function should have dealt with.  Apologies if not.

"Reprinted from From Stephen Fry's blog:

    The Daily Mail and Lord Dacre appeasing again


    DM can stand for Direct Messages in Twitter or the Daily Mail out there in the big bad world. I don’t read either, and all my friends know that I never read British newspapers of any kind.

    Nonetheless there are always those that like to sympathise: today I’ve had plenty of, “Ooh you seem to have riled the Daily Mail” and “The Daily Fail have got it in for you today”… tweets. None of which has made me turn to the loathed organ in response and dignify it with reading whatever it is that it has written about me. I have pieced together that it’s the usual “what right does the pompous luvvie have…” etc etc. Well, the same right as the pompous journo who wrote the piece I would assume. In other words the right of free speech. Are they suggesting I actually don’t have the right to blog? Apparently the hate-piece* was put together by a disc jockey called Colin something or other whose great use for Lord Dacre, the Mail’s autocratic führer, is that he is gay. “Hurrah! Stephen Fry doesn’t speak for all gay people!” Well, of course I bloody don’t and would never claim to. But if there’s one thing the Mail can do better than any other paper it’s erect a fake coconut and then knock it down and claim a prize.

    I have helped spark a debate about the Sochi Olympiad and I can be as proud (or “smug” as they would undoubtedly call it) about that as I like.

    There’s no real personal animus in this at all. A friend gave me a “Hated by the Daily Mail” badge and it remains one of the proudest things I own.

    image

    But there’s form here. The Mail still can’t quite live with the shame that it has always, always been historically wrong about everything - large and small - from Picasso to equal pay for women.  Because it has always been against progress, the liberalising of attitudes, modern art and strangers (whether by race, gender or sexuality). Of course they’ll leap on a Stephen Lawrence bandwagon once the seeds of their decades of anti-immigration racism (read a 1960s or 1970s Daily Mail) have been sown, but deep down they have always come from the same place and had the same instinct for the lowest, most mean-spirited, hypocritical, spiteful and philistine elements of our island nation.

    Most notoriously of all, they loved Adolf Hitler when he came to power, and as the Czech crisis arose they were the appeasement newspaper. And woe-betide any liberal-minded anti-fascist who warned that the man was unstable and that consistently satisfying his vanity, greed and ambition was only storing up trouble. The whole liberal left, not to mention Winston Churchill, were mocked and scorned for their instinctive distrust of Hitler. The Daily Mail knew better.

    In January 1934 Harold Harmsworth, 1st Viscount Rothermere, younger brother of the paper’s founder Alfred Northcliffe (the 4th Viscount Rothermere is chairman of the company that still owns it) wrote an article called “Hurrah for the Blackshirts”.  He was sending congratulatory telegrams to “My dear Führer” as he liked to call him, right up until a few months before the outbreak of war. For more details read this article by Richard Norton-Taylor

    http://www.theguardian.com/media/2005/apr/01/pressandpublishing.secondworldwar?guni=Article:in%20body%20link

    Of course I know Putin isn’t Hitler. But then Hitler wasn’t the full Hitler we now think of in back in 1935 either. The death camps and atrocities were years away. He became the Hitler of 1939 because we never stopped him. All historians agree now on how doubtful and uncertain he was in 35, 36, 37, and 38. The occupation of the Rheinland provinces of Alsace Lorraine and the annexation of Austria went unchallenged. The Olympic games reinforced his huge status at home.

    Nor was Stalin the full Stalin in 1920. True terrible bloody leaders become so because they are not stopped. The last four lines of W. H. Auden’s The Tyrant come to mind:

     

        He knew human folly like the back of his hand,

        And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;

        When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,

        And when he cried the little children died in the streets.

     

    Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Franco and any other despot you care to mention: they become despotic, maniacal, more autocratic, more insane every time they are given a greater sense of their own power. The fanatical junior KGB officer Vladimir Putin will become, if he is allowed to get away with it, as autocratic as any Tsar or any Soviet chairman. Vladimir the Terrible will have blood on his hands. He already does, but there will be so so much more. Little children will die in the streets. All power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely. That saying is so well-known it’s hardly worth repeating. You would think…

    But apparently I don’t have the right to bleat my liberal opinion. Apparently because one of my livelihoods is acting (oh how they love to forget the fact that I’ve written books and even more millions of words of journalism) makes anything I say “luvvie talk”. It rather amuses me that the Oxford English Dictionary cites me as the first person to use the word luvvie. The word has come back to bite me in the A***, you might say…

    IL DUCE DACRE

    I should add this, just because you have a Right To Know. Lord Dacre is himself a frothing autocrat. An absolutely foul-mouthed boss, who constantly screams the c word at just about anyone. He would have read my Open Letter to David Cameron and yelled that “that chuff Fry needs another fecking dressing fecking down” — just the kind of language that his paper would prissily decry of course, there’s the glory in the vile naughty boy’s hypocrisy. He sends his son to Eton, but somehow mocks me for being posh. He bullies, swears and shrieks, but presents his paper as having the values and standards of a misty Midsomer Britain. He decries indecency on one page and pushes his male readers into a semi over a semi-nude actress on another. His cancer scare, miracle cure stories are sickeningly anti-science and the only good thing to be said about his Mail is that no one decent or educated believes in it. Which is what you can say about psychics, mediums, homeopathy and the casting of runes, but that makes it, like them, more exploitative and wicked, not less.

    Dacre is, all those who have had the misfortune to work for him assure me, just about as loathsome, self-regarding, morally putrid, vengeful and disgusting a man as it possible to be. His power is absolute. Cross him either in private or public and you will be assassinated by his sycophantic squad of columnist minions, all of them infected with his brand of repulsive hypocritical and gleeful spite, ready to vomit out a screed against the BBC (watch this hilarious Vine loop as an example http://entertainment.ie/wtf/Watch-If-you-think-Sky-News-was-bad-with-the-royal-baby-coverage/202884.htm ) or any other institution they hate.

    He absolutely despises me and thinks I stand for everything that is wrong about Britain and I think exactly the same of him.

    Well, you pays your money and you takes your choice. In the case of the Daily Mail that’s 50p or whatever it is now and in the case of me it’s for the low, low price of free.

    *hate-piece is a genuinely used term: I can remember being rung up by an editor in the 80s when I still wrote for papers and magazines. “Yeah, we need a hate-piece on x by tomorrow”. It was one of the moments that eventually stopped me from ever writing for papers again. That and the blessed advent of sites like this and twitter.
"
Nothing is so firmly believed as that which we least know.  ― Michel de Montaigne

Si hoc legere scis, nimis eruditionis habes.

Offline Ian

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Re: Newspapers: Decline and fall or renaissance?
« Reply #3 on: October 05, 2013, 08:41:31 pm »
Well, the DFM's stuff about Miliband's dad has some bloggers having a wonderful time:

http://600transformer.blogspot.co.uk/
Nothing is so firmly believed as that which we least know.  ― Michel de Montaigne

Si hoc legere scis, nimis eruditionis habes.

Offline Michael

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Re: Newspapers: Decline and fall or renaissance?
« Reply #4 on: October 05, 2013, 11:22:43 pm »
 Well --- thats shaken me.

  If I cannot get a copy of my beloved Daily Post, the Mail is the one I go for.

   Just shows that I haven't got much judgment.

   But, rest assured, I will never, ever spend one pence on the Sun.         Mike

Offline Michael

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Re: Newspapers: Decline and fall or renaissance?
« Reply #5 on: February 25, 2014, 02:24:51 pm »
   Step forward any budding economists and put me wise as to what's going on.

  I have recently returned after three months in Goa. I buy at least one newspaper a day both here and in Goa. We all know that in the u k the newspaper industry is going through a terrible phase battered by falling readership and rising costs. I return to the u k to find the Post is now up to 60 pence a weekday and 80 pence on a Saturday, but the Saturday edition has far more pages. Horray , until you realise that the vast bulk of the increase is just full page adverts.

 Now to Goa and it's newspaper industry. There are five main daily papers all available at 8 in the morning. Probably a lot earlier, but I was on holiday. Enough said. The size of all of them is roughly 25 per cent larger than our tabloids. There are around 20 pages. They have a fair amount of adverts large and small, about the same percentage as in the u k. The Indian news is up to date, the international news about 24 hours behind.

 They have several financial advantages over the u.k.  Labour costs are probably about 25 per cent of ours. Most goods are about half our price, so no doubt the inks and paper are also half our price. Fuel for delivery vans is half ours. Power is even cheaper, about a third of ours.

 But they have disadvantages.. For delivery they have virtually no roads, just tracks and potholes. Often flooded, full of cattle, broken bridges etc etc.  there are a lot of people who cannot read. There are a lot of different languages so the papers have to be printed in different langurs. There are frequent disruptions to the power supplies.

 BUT. The Post and other similar dailies cost 60 pence.  After conversion the Goa papers cost THREE pence.

  Economists please explain that if you can

Offline Nemesis

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Re: Newspapers: Decline and fall or renaissance?
« Reply #6 on: February 25, 2014, 02:34:27 pm »
I have always bought a Telegraph on Saturday mainly because I am a crossword addict and the General Knowledge one is my weekly treat ( sad isn't it?) It is now £2, but I do get a good read on many interesting articles, plus my crossword. Recently I have been given Monday's Telegraph which is priced at £1.40. Compared to an Express or a Mail it is like a pamphlet !
Mad, Bad and Dangerous to know.

Offline DaveR

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Re: Newspapers: Decline and fall or renaissance?
« Reply #7 on: February 25, 2014, 06:24:16 pm »
I subscribe to the iPad edition of the Daily Post, it works really well and is a lot cheaper than the print version:
https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/north-wales-daily-post-newspaper/id645840338?mt=8

Offline Michael

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Re: Newspapers: Decline and fall or renaissance?
« Reply #8 on: February 25, 2014, 06:44:52 pm »
   Dave, thats a relief. I have been gobsmacked by the way Trinity have got these price rises. I think it was something like 35p, then 45p, then 50p (at about monthly intervals). Its only because I was away for 3 months that the rise to 60p struck home.
   Am I an oddity or are there others who are altering their habits because of this? Normally when I am in the Bay in the winter I get up, wash, have cup of tea, drive to Morrisons, buy the post, breakfast in the SeaView precinct. Now its park in Abergele road (with difficulty ) and go in the cafe that has a free Post. And hope to hell I don't get in an argument with anyone for keeping it too long.

Offline Yorkie

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Re: Newspapers: Decline and fall or renaissance?
« Reply #9 on: February 25, 2014, 06:45:48 pm »
I subscribe to the iPad edition of the Daily Post, it works really well and is a lot cheaper than the print version:
https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/north-wales-daily-post-newspaper/id645840338?mt=8

Free for the first month, then £7.99 (wish they would say £8) each month after,  cancel at any time.  Think I will give it a try even though I never buy or read the post.
 :D
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Fools have to say something.
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Offline Yorkie

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Re: Newspapers: Decline and fall or renaissance?
« Reply #10 on: October 22, 2014, 06:22:50 pm »
Just had our copy of The Pioneer delivered.  Opened it up and soon realised that I had read most of the articles through the Forum and the good intentions of one of our Members!  Ah well, it's the Weekly News tomorrow so I probably don't need to buy it! 
 _))*
Wise men have something to say.
Fools have to say something.
Cicero

Offline Ian

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Re: Newspapers: Decline and fall or renaissance?
« Reply #11 on: April 27, 2016, 08:26:16 am »
There's an interesting (if depressingly predictable) pattern in the UK front pages this morning.

Headlining on the front page the inquest verdict were the i, the Star, the New Day, the Guardian, the Mirror, the Echo, the Metro and even the Telegraph.  Making no or little mention of it were the SUN, the DFM, the Times, The FT and the Express. The link between dishonesty, or refusal to accept the truth and Rupert Murdoch publications couldn't be clearer. Of course, there's also the egregious Bernard Ingham and Margaret Thatcher - both culpable in the sleazy attempt to deflect blame from the Police (on whom Thatcher relied to control the unions) and onto the Liverpool fans.

I've long been on the fence regarding the Leveson Inquiry recommendations but if ever there was blatant evidence that something needs to be done to sort out the garbage put out by, in particular, the Murdoch stable, this is it.
Nothing is so firmly believed as that which we least know.  ― Michel de Montaigne

Si hoc legere scis, nimis eruditionis habes.

Offline Merddin Emrys

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Re: Newspapers: Decline and fall or renaissance?
« Reply #12 on: April 27, 2016, 01:06:03 pm »
I don't bother with any of the papers, seem outdated when we have tv news and the internet, we do get the Pioneer though as it is delivered free!  D)
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Offline Ian

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Nothing is so firmly believed as that which we least know.  ― Michel de Montaigne

Si hoc legere scis, nimis eruditionis habes.

Offline SteveH

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