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- on January 26, 2010 at 4:32 am
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by adamjones, Spada PR. Spada PR said: RT @applemacbookpro: I loved that! Losing the will to pay through the wall http://bit.ly/4sL4jV [...]
Losing the will to pay through the wall
January 25, 2010It’s a tricky business, the art of securing reader loyalty – and cash. Whether pay walls will work is the hot topic among media folk at present, with all eyes on the Murdoch empire and its reported implementation of pay walls in May. If there is a consensus, it appears to be one of doubt. As one long-serving, senior journalist was heard to opine recently: “Murdoch doesn’t get things wrong. But I don’t know. This time he might not be right.”
Another media type – an ad man, in fact – drops us a line to lament the fact that he can no longer access the FT through mediauk alerts.
“I wanted to read about how Yahoo was keeping up in the social media race, which struck me as a good story from the FT,” he writes, “but when I clicked on the mediauk alert, a page came up on the FT website telling me that I’d exceeded my quota of free stories and had to register if I wanted to read it.”
To this, we suggested that registering with FT was not too onerous a task. Moreover, at this juncture doing so was still free.
“I haven’t got the time,” said our correspondent. “I guess I can live without the story after all.”
We fear that if some people can’t even be bothered to register for free online newspaper content, the idea that they will pay for it has a long way to go before becoming reality.
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2 Responses to “Losing the will to pay through the wall”
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- on March 23, 2010 at 9:41 am
[...] that is, at the FT. For all its talk of pay walls (about which we harbour grave doubts, but that’s another story), week in, week out the FT produces the highest quality journalism [...]
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.
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- Filed under Communication, Legal Business
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.
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- Filed under Communication, Legal Business
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.
- Written by Admin
- Filed under Communication, Legal Business
