Bikini-clad girls from Belo Horizonte to save newspapers?

September 1, 2009

super-noticia

The FT tells us that ‘Brazilian tabloids show there’s still life in print‘, citing the commendable sales of Super Notícia, a tabloid based in Belo Horizonte which sold 293,178 copies a day in May. As the FT explains:

The labourers, cleaners, taxi drivers and maids that make up the paper’s readership lap up its zingy mix of news, gossip, football and crime. “Super created a new public that had never read a journal before,” says Lúcia Castro, editor in chief. “It is a phenomenon for the city. Everybody reads it.”

Elsewhere, the FT notes that “a new urban lower middle class has grown up in Brazil. ‘Class C’ now makes up 50 per cent of the population, or 90m Brazilians. Comparisons have been made with 19th century Britain, when the first tabloids appeared to serve the working class.”

This latter point may dissuade optimists from concluding that the Super Noticia blueprint can save the UK newspaper industry, so too the paper’s daily staple of semi-clad maidens. We can’t really see them on the front of the FT (on the Telegraph, maybe, but not the FT). Then again, perhaps we should be more libertarian. Could it be that bikini-clad women will save newspapers?

 

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When a lawyer’s son is before the law

September 8, 2010

A lawyer of Swordplay’s acquaintance finds himself in a fix.

“My teenage son is to be interviewed by the local constable,” he tells us. “He is alleged to have committed an offence.”

We gasp, for such seems the appropriate response, and then ask: is it serious?

“No, it is not,” our troubled legal friend tells us. “In the great scheme of things, my son’s alleged transgression is about as de minimis as they get.”

For a split second, we wonder if said teenage son is cognisant of lawyerly terms of art such as de minimis, but rapidly conclude that the answer to this question is not a sine qua non of further discourse. And so we press on. That sounds good, we say, relatively speaking, at least.

“Yes,” says the lawyer, “but I am at a loss as to what to do with him. Do I come down hard and ground him, or do I play the liberal card, or do I find a compromise?”

That depends, we aver.

“On what?” asks our man.

On whether you would prefer to deal with your son’s alleged offence as a lawyer, or as a father, or as a father who is a lawyer, or maybe even as a lawyer who is a father.

“I see your point,” says the lawyer. And then, as if to prove that there is no cure for recidivism, he says: “The offence is, after all, de minimis.”

Without prejudice, we add.

Pictured: something out of Kafka. Now there was a man who knew about the law. And had a tough old father, too.

Max Mosley and Wayne Rooney: bedfellows?

September 6, 2010

We rarely enjoy pondering Max Mosley – the man, the sins, the legal action, what he stands for – but confess to a degree of grudging admiration for his tenacity in trying to change the law of privacy. As this story from the Independent has it, Mosley has lodged a request with the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg asking that, by law, journalists must inform the subject of a story of the private details they intend to print, prior to publication.

We suspect the motor racing man would never have thought it, but he would appear to have an unlikely bedfellow in a certain England footballer. Step forward, Wayne Rooney, who would presumably put his name to Mosley’s petition.

Pictured courtesy of NashvilleScene: some bedfellows are stranger than fiction.


Memo to Freelance Writers: return that editor’s call quickly

September 3, 2010

Woe betide those who freelance and fail to return a call.

We say this upon hearing of a normally prolific freelance journalist who picked up a voicemail from an editor at one of the nationals on Tuesday afternoon. Please call us, was the message, and it could mean just one thing – a commission.

Our hero’s habitual practice is to return such calls as soon as is reasonably practicable, as m’learned friends might put it. In practice, that would habitually mean within a couple of hours. Most atypically, and for reasons we have yet to fathom, our man failed to call back for a full 24 hours.

By then, said editor had looked elsewhere. One of our man’s competitors had the gig, an interesting piece about cricket and the law, one which might just be in The Times today and which, we assume, asks whether the Pakistan cricket team have been caught out (in the legal sense, you understand).

We make no judgement on the no ball scandal, save to say that it is a scandal, but in another sense the moral is clear: in the fast-paced world of modern media, he who hesitates is lost.

Pictured courtesy of PrintedClothing.com: a fast-selling shirt.