Charles on… anything that comes along

Via Greenslade to Martin Stabe and Andrew Grant-Adamson, The Independent has a blog which is so awful (think cheap: think getting a free Typepad account and then possibly forgetting the password, or not reminding people to update it, or possibly not having enough - or any? - machines capable of running an operating system introduced in 2001) that the kindest thing would be to bin them and start again.

In my time there - around 2003, I think, when the Guardian started blogging mildly (via The Online blog, which still exists but doesn’t do anything - Neil? - I did briefly consider doing something (going as far as getting a blogger account, doing one post just to prove it, and halting). And though David Felton, then the web boss, said “Sure, do” I also thought that I wouldn’t get any extra time or money or resources to do it. So I didn’t.

It looks like that great tradition continues…

..oh, I hadn’t seen this Press Gazette interview with Ivan Fallon, who could audition for Canute when panto season rolls around.

The Indy has resisted the newsroom integration efforts announced by The Guardian, The Times and The Daily Telegraph, and won’t be following the other quality papers’ efforts to post some of their material online before it appears in print. “Newspaper journalists are not geared to instant news; it’s not what they do,” says Fallon.

Funny, then, who are all those people on these things we call “wire services”? Or on the TV? That’s pretty instant. What’s different about someone in front of a keyboard who could post to a website or to a printing press? Answer: the printing press takes longer to appear. But once you press “send”, it’s gone.

“Most political stories happen during the day, and our journalists — like most journalists — reflect on them and write something that is more analytical than what you see on breaking news.”

Yes, and they can do that online too.

Readers look for analysis and nuance out of newspaper stories, Fallon insists. Newspapers don’t break stories, and neither do their websites. “I’ve never seen a story broken online. Before radio or TV? I have Sky News on all day,” he says.

Possibly this came out before Jeff Randall and the Telegraph broke the story of Michael Grade going to ITV. Which was online first, TV next, print last. (Ah yes, it was - June 2006. Changed your mind at all, Ivan?)

“You don’t get your news out of newspapers. People haven’t done for quite a few years. We’ve gone one stage further: we don’t put news on the front page because we’re trying to give them something different. Our front page has become our brand, and we think that’s the direction that newspapers are going, what we call ‘viewspapers’.” But despite the “viewspaper” emphasis, the Indy isn’t rushing to embrace online commentary or blogs. “We’re podcasting where we can make money out of it. How do we make money out of doing blogs?

Ah yes, the “podcasting making money”. I hear that a publisher offered to pay some good money to have their author featured on a podcast. Not on merit (ie not chosen by the Indie), but for the money coming in. Tail, dog, wag?

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
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• Spam attack? Tell Google, and wipe out online herpes (14 July 2005; score: 39.56%)
• Why I risked breaking the blog: because Wordpress blogs are getting hacked (20 October 2006; score: 36.64%)