Charles on… anything that comes along

Nine Inch Nails had a track with the wonderful title “The Downward Spiral”. Were they channelling, ahead of time, Tristan Davies and his wonderful shrinking Sindie?

He tells Meeja Guardian that

the new look paper would be “compact, concise, comprehensive”, with the “news values of a daily paper and the production values of a weekly news magazine”.

He added that New Review would replace what were “two quite flimsy magazines”. Books and culture stories will move to the New Review.

“The difference between the paper that we will produce on Sunday and the paper that we produced last Sunday are as big as when [The Independent] went compact,” Mr Davies said.

Roy Greenslade (whom when I was at the Indie we all used to hate because he had nothing good to say about the Indie; now I understand why) comments:

Somebody once asked what the Independent titles were independent of? The answer, of course, is readers. I predict that the revamped Sindy will underline that truth.

Talking to a friend the other day, we agreed that what the Indie needs is to milk its specialist writers and get them to write a personal column every day commenting on the news, or what they felt was news. Basically, get that niche of readers who really like those writers to keep reading. Because that’s where the Indie remains strong. It’s its general news coverage that’s weak. The analysis has always been good. But the waterfront’s too wide now. And the tide’s coming in.

Update: well, the readers who could be bothered to comment on the IoS blog (it has a blog? No, me neither) don’t seem enamoured of it. At all. Nor is Greenslade, of course.

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So I was pointed to an interesting article about Monstermob, the evil geniuses who no doubt have a stock of white cats that they can stroke while going “Mwa-ha-ha-ha-haaaa” (they were the people behind the Crazy Frog ringtone, since you wonder Johnny-come-latelies in the ringtone market - thanks James [his page needs some weird plugin] in the comments).

Read through it, past the most brilliant response by the writer, Louise Armistead to the Monstermob chief exec:

“Give me any track from any artist and we’ll play it on this mobile right now,” he says in a low Lancashire drawl that makes him sound almost bored.

Sound of Da Police by KRS-One, please.

For the first time, Higginson stops and looks uneasy.

“Is that a popular band?” he says accusingly. I nod smugly. “Well, it’s not on our system now but it will be tomorrow.” (It wasn’t.)

Anyway, I’m just getting into the swing of it all when I reach the bottom of the page. “Page 1 of 5,” it says.

At which point I stop reading. It may be true that you lose 10% of your readers with every paragraph (and there’s the lovely fact that the editor from the Society of Newspaper Editors then used that stat to make the flawed deduction that nobody reads the 11th paragraph of a story; in fact if that stat holds you’ve lost 65%, not 100%), but when it comes to clicking through on newspaper pages and having to wait for all the associated guff to load (I block certain adservers on my home router because they just hold up page loads to an absurd degree), life becomes too short. The Guardian’s practice, of giving it all on a single page, makes so much more sense here. People come to read? Let them read. If you need to serve adverts, you might find that the people who read to the bottom are the ones who are really going to respond to adverts.

But cutting stories into twitching tiny pieces in the pursuit of artificially inflated “page view” statistics is actually a great way of losing readers. One of the other tech sites - Cnet? ZDNet? - does this too, and it earns my immediate ire whenever I discover it.

Still, I’m definitely going to try that KRS-One line on someone soon.

Update: Monstermob is now having a bad time of it since then.. Tch.

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