Tuesday, August 11th, 2009

The newspaper online pay-wall debate rages on…

…largely in the comments section to my post a couple of days ago, oddly enough. Soilman points me to an interesting article in the Telegraph about Swedish peer-to-peer site The Pirate Bay and the general unwillingness of consumers to pay for content these days. Here’s what the Telegraph thinks: Why won’t consumers pay for content? The […]

Tuesday, August 11th, 2009

Health scares and the media…

…in a nutshell.  This goes some way to explaining why I was reading headlines like this about swine flu a couple of weeks ago, and now I’m reading headlines like this about swine flu medication…

Sunday, August 9th, 2009

More arguments against the newspaper online pay wall

Here’s a nice piece from Scooping The News that outlines clearly why they think charging for online news content is a bit of a non-starter. It covers the main bases: The supply of web content is now vast Charging hasn’t worked for anyone else yet. Newspapers don’t have compelling enough content to compete There will […]

Sunday, August 9th, 2009

Boston Globe to set up web pay wall

Even casual readers of Freelance Unbound will know I’m pretty sceptical that the news media will find it easy to make a go of charging for online access to plain old news. But, you know, I could be wrong. A case in point is the Boston Globe, which has announced it will definitely, absolutely, start doing […]

Friday, August 7th, 2009

Maybe we should make the BBC force us to pay for its web site

There’s a good piece on PaidContent.org about Rupert Murdoch’s plans to charge for News International’s web content. Part of this will be to charge for access to The Sun and the News of the World online. How will he manage to do this? “Just make our content better and differentiate it from other people. And I […]

Wednesday, August 5th, 2009

This could be Rotterdam or anywhere…

…as it seems that the Dutch, like everyone else in the developed world, can read a free copy of the Metro on their daily commute. The main difference? Fewer girls in bikinis…

Monday, August 3rd, 2009

New Stop Frame animation blog

I’m off to glamorous Rotterdam this week to do some stop frame animation with my good friend Arnold. He’s very talented (much more so than me), though obviously as he’s Dutch he’s a bit bonkers. Evidence of this can be found in his showreel here. As a result, journalism and digital media are probably not […]

Sunday, August 2nd, 2009

Facebook, teenagers, suicide

Apparently, social networking sites prevent teenagers from developing rounded relationships, makes them treat friendship as a commodity and helps drive them to suicide. It seems that Archbishop of Westminster Vincent Nichols is not a big fan of SMS and email, either. Friendship is not a commodity, friendship is something that is hard work and enduring […]

Friday, July 31st, 2009

When news mattered

Back in 1940, people would stop outside the local newspaper office to read the headlines posted in the window. Well, there was no rolling TV news or internet… Image from the ever-browsable Shorpy (motto: “Always Something Interesting”).

Thursday, July 30th, 2009

Living history

As I’m drowning in web taxonomy at the moment, let’s take time out to enjoy last weekend’s English Heritage Festival of History. I joined 1,000 happy historic re-enacters in a field in Northamptonshire to watch a mini re-enactment of D-Day, be shown how a Sten gun worked and enjoy all the grisly details of Tudor-style […]