The Times Online - a new future?

I've just had a sneak preview of the new Times and Sunday Times websites.  At first glance I have to say they look fantastic.  A brave mix of modern and traditional layout, coupled with some clever navigation to ease a smooth journey around the site. Great work.

However, they have GOT to make money out of it.  Owners News International nailed their colours to the mast when Rupert Murdoch declared he was going to make his websites pay.

Punters will soon have to shell out to read the times online.  In many ways I wish him luck.  He has huge power in the media and it would be ironic that the man I opposed as a young journalist should turn out to be the saviour of reporting - but sadly I doubt it.

For a start News International simply has too much competition.  I downloaded the iphone app for Metro and it is great.  Effectively you are reading the Press Association news feed - the same copy that forms the basis of a great deal of national news reporting.  Metro made its name on being free so it can hardly go paid for.

The Times is relying on its highly paid columnists to attract paying customers and what it would refer to as higher quality news coverage.  That's a big ask.

Younger readers especially are conditioned now to getting their news for free.  The whole industry needs a rethink.. There will always be a demand for material written by good journalists.  They need to brainstorm a whole new way of making it pay.

The biggest strength national newspapers, and local ones for that matter, have is their brand. Times, Mail, Echo, Gazette, Post, etc.  But time is running out on these brands.  As people get older and starting dropping off that powers wanes.  Readerships are literally dying and publishers need to act fast to retain the brand value in a whole new way.

Personally I would make local papers virtually free (say 5p a copy) to bag more quality advertising and run the web and hard copies in unison rather than the half way house situation that exists at the moment.

Death of the Quango: Cuts, Deficit, Cuts, Quango, Budgets - Happy days!

And there off. After months of talking, waiting, predicting, the cuts are finally here.  It's almost a relief that they are finally here.

They spent ages hiding them from us that it was becoming a case of wanting them more the less we knew.  If that makes sense. Hurrah! They are here!

Travel Lodge for civil servants and the crappy train carriages like the rest of us - fair do's.  Meaningless quangos to go - fair enough.  I'm really beginning to enjoy this.

Bye bye Becta - I didn't even know what they did? Apparently they are, soon to be were, the education IT procurement quango!  What a laff!

Let's get some more!  Someone create a Wii game - Get Quango! I thought of it first!!!!

Cut fuel costs by saving petrol. Easy?

A report in a national newspaper highlighted how many drivers have slipped into bad habits while behind the wheel, which is costing them dear.

Over-revving is a very common way of wasting petrol. Typically drivers let revs run to over 3,000 rpm in a petrol car and 2,500 in a diesel before moving up a gear.

But drivers should be changing up at 2,500 in a petrol car and 2,000 in a diesel. While this might not sound much, the difference can make quite a dent on your fuel tank and in turn your pocket!

Going into too high a gear can also be bad for petrol use as when an engine labours you are using too much fuel.

Negotiating speed bumps badly can also drink petrol as speeding up and slowing down is bad for consumption. Instead drivers should go a steady 15-20mph over speed bumped roads to save fuel.

Speed is also an issue. Driving at 55mph or 65mph makes little difference but as soon as a car goes over 75mph it drinks petrol.

It pays to remember that an efficient driver is a smooth driver as every time you slow down and then accelerate the car uses more fuel. Another petrol saving tip is to keep tyres inflated to the right level.

Annabel Green of national IFA Moneygate said: “A recent fuel economy test drive in The Observer newspaper demonstrated how much could be saved. Based on a monitored test run, the motorist revealed that driving efficiently could save him £7,734 over 10 years driving a mini car and save 16 tonnes of CO2 if he did 15,000 miles a year.

“This is a massive saving. Many people are looking to trim their budgets and this is another example of how it is best to look at all household products and services to cut costs.”

For advice on how to save money go to www.moneygate.co.uk

Cuts for Children - Brown scaremongering?

Now Brown goes for the jugular warning of Cuts for Children. Run - they are after your're kids!!!
Labour attacked Lib Dem plans to axe child trust funds and Tory proposals to scale back child tax credits.
He said the Conservatives are focusing on the "broken society" saying a "stew" of crime, addiction, anti-social behaviour and poverty affects millions of people.
A stew!  Not a casserole - a stew!  Wow - he appears to be clutching at straws and not Jack Straws either.
To make matters worse for Labour children's TV character Peppa Pig will not appear at one of its election event as the show's distributor wants to avoid "any controversy".

Hung Parliament - is it so bad? Blog.

Is a threat of a hung parliament really so bad?  Tory old stager Ken Clarke inferred that the city would collapse under a hail of indecision.  Meanwhile Cameron warns of years of weak Government.
Well - we seemed to do alright during the second world war under a coalition.  While the last hung parliament was in the early 70s it didn't last long so really the only real stint during "modern" times was during the war.
Just like then it could be fair to say we are in a state of emergency.  Clarke warns of a collapse in City confidence - what about a our collapse in confidence in the City! Let's face it, the parties are so close together they are already practically one consensus Goverment. There's no Michael Foot v Thatcher battle of dogmas here.  You could slip a fag packet between the policies of the three main parties - they are effectively arguing over bits and bobs.
Cameron talks of cutting the bloated state but as Thatcher could well remind him it was the building up of the public sector, especially in the North, that held off social collapse in the 80s.  He knows that and will cut accordingly. Brown will cut, Clegg will cut - they have to but at a sensible rate.  So really, they are all arguing over travelling in feet and inches and not miles.
Vote hung!!!

Can The Times make it paid online?

So can Murdock really make it pay. In June it will cost £1 a day or £2 a week to get access to the Times and Sunday Times new websites, News Corp said in a statement.

Subscribers to the print versions will get free access to the websites. The Times newspaper costs £1 on weekdays and £1.50 on Saturdays, and The Sunday Times costs £2.

James Harding, editor of The Times, told the BBC that the move was a "big risk, but less of a risk than throwing our journalism away, while Rupert Murdoch, the chairman of News Corp, believes people will pay for good journalism.

It is a massive risk. While there is so much free news out there will people really pay to subscribe. They will have to make it radically improved in terms of web presentation so I wait with baited breath to see what the new sites look like.

Someone had to take the risk and perhaps Murdoch is the one most equipped to give it a try.

News Corp's Wall Street Journal already charges for online content but it is in a niche market. If The Telegraph online remains free will people pay for Times? Difficult but Murdoch is not daft - he is trialing the service with titles that have been propped up financially for years so there is less to lose than say with The Sun which has the best visitor figures for News International.

The latest ABC traffic figures for Times Online - which includes the Times and Sunday Times - saw daily user figures rise 6% to 1.22m, while monthly browsers fell to 20.42m.

Assuming that only 5% of daily users convert to the paywall system - a standard metric for paywalls - that would bring in £1.83m if they each buy a £1 daily pass. At a 10% conversion, it would net £3.66m per month for the two papers. If more chose the weekly pass, the revenues would be lower.

The move follows Murdoch's statement in August last year that that he would introduce charges for all his newspapers, saying that News Corp wanted to prevent readers moving to free sites by making its content better and differentiated from other publishers.

Well the race is underway - who will follow and will it be a success. Who knows but the future of print journalism is at stake. Will the man most journalists once reviled turn out to be the saviour of their sector!!

www.pressgenerator.com

House-giveaway and press generator

What do you do when you want to give away your lifestyle - call www.pressgenerwww.pressgenerator.comator.com

Check out our press release which is working its way around the web! The property crash has forced a London man to put his luxury pad up for grabs in a village fete-style competition, as he prepares to move down under. (www.house-giveaway.com)

Australia-bound IT consultant Adam Trutwein is offering a once-in-a-lifetime chance for someone to live an up-market London lifestyle for free, by offering up almost everything he owns as a prize in a ‘how many sweets in the jar’ competition! www.house-giveaway.com.

Up for grabs for a lucky winner in the £20 per entry competition, is a luxury £375,000 fully furnished, two-bedroom apartment in London’s trendy Islington. The apartment, which would be mortgage-free for the winner, is for keeps and is packed full of high-spec goodies such as a 50" HD plasma TV and hand-made Italian furniture.

The winner literally won’t have to spend a penny as full running costs and bills are thrown in for a year – from Sky HD subscriptions and utility bills, to groceries - and there’s even the service of a cleaner!

Adam, 26, explained that he came up with the quirky life-changing package idea after deciding to leave his top city-based IT career behind to follow his own dreams of a fresh start in Australia.

He said: “Making the move to Australia is a fresh start for me and I thought it would be a great idea to offer someone the opportunity to change their life too, particularly as everything seems to be a struggle at the moment.

“Offering up everything I own in a competition provides a wonderful opportunity for someone to kick-start their life in London – be that a new career, a year off having fun, helping out your son/daughter or simply getting that crucial first step on the property ladder.

"The package really does include everything – there’s even a free pass for underground and bus travel thrown in for a year, £200 a week for 1 year in cash and the use of an on-site gym.”

Adam has put the competition in the hands of London solicitors Turbervilles who hold the sealed jar of sweets.  All the cash raised will be held by Barclays Bank until the winner is announced.

A total of 30,000 tickets are up for grabs at £20 a go through his website www.house-giveaway.com  The closing date will be when the 30,000 tickets are sold or 30th July 2010, whichever comes first.

Adam, originally from Gillingham, added: “The chance of winning this competition far outweigh the odds of winner the national lottery!”

Full details and competition rules can be found online at www.house-giveaway.com

GIVEAWAY FACTFILE

A two-bedroom luxury apartment in London’s trendy Islington worth over £375,000!

A 50’’ HD plasma TV

Fully furnished to a high standard

Free food for a year

All utility bills, service charges and ground rent paid for a year

Services of a cleaner for a year

A year’s free internet, telephone and Sky HD TV subscription

Council tax and TV licence paid for a year

£10,400 in cash

The free use of communal gym and Japanese gardens

A year’s underground and bus travel pass

Adam can be contacted for interview by email at adam.trutwein@mac.com or by mobile phone on 07968759649 or go to www.house-giveaway.com.

Press Release: Press Generator No Frills PR

There's no getting away from it.  Business is getting tough out there.  But pulling marketing and pr activity is a bad move.  However, there are ways of reducing budgets without affecting quality.

Many businesses retain PR agencies on contracts to carry out campaigns.  For many, these agencies carry out quality and creative wide-ranging campaigns but for some all they are paying for is a press release service.  In many cases the client is expected to come up with the ideas!

These clients can cut their PR budgets by simply using a press release service.  If they know what the target market is and they know how many press releases they use a year - it's simple.

Just think retainers of a thousands pounds a month could be reduced to a couple of hundred.  Imagine a whole year's PR campaign for a couple of grand!!!

Press Release: Shakin Stevens

Poor Shaky gets done for lamping a photographer.  But alas it was not a Paparazzi photographer snapping him coming out of some top nightclub but an over enthusiastic amateur getting close at a gig at a hotel in Ballymena.

Which gets me wondering if Shaky has spent all his cash or why else would he be doing a turn in a hotel in Ballymena.  Last time I was in Ballymena it hadn't yet turned into Las Vegas.

Press Release: Snow Joke

Yes it's time for media cliches to be wheeled out. Lots of snow equals WHITE OUT, WHITE HELL, SNOW JOKE, etc.

Interesting watching the rolling news channels to see the use of the word COULD. An outside broadcast had a news reporter standing with a free flowing motorway behind him.  It could, he said, be white out at any time and traffic could come to stand still.

That's the problem with outside broadcast - first you have to get there in which case it is probably not as bad as it is somewhere else.  Lots of the BBC coverage has been from the NE of England which is suffering but not as badly as some parts of the country.

Watch out for the word could!

Press Release: Peace

Just a daft thought but maybe peace would be nice,. maybe even a little bit of love.
Happy New Year♠

Press release: rage against the machine

Modern media is a funny old game.  Can you imagine back in the 70s trying to get a campaign on the go to stop Gary Glitter or Slade getting to number one.

Thanks to Facebook someone has launched a campaign to get the early 90s angry rockers to number one ahead of Xfactor winner Joe.

To date they are making a decent stab at it.  Although they probably will not manage it they have still managed to rattle Simon Cowell.

Just think what you would have had to do in the 70s - write a zillion letters, go on a Jarrow style march, print a million leaflets, write letters to every newspaper in the country, shout at passers by, etc.  Even then it would amount to bot all!

Now if you get the mood of the zeitgeist right you are on to a winner.  500,000 plus followers on the facebook site - it really is amazing.  Now all they need is to flog them something.

Newspapers have their facebooks sites and yet they don't seem to manage them or do anything with them to stimulate readership figures.

What they need is some young guns with some uber-knowledge - what ever that is.

Press Release: Is little news dead?

I don't know about you but my news judgement is being affected by bigger macro matters.  A lady was on the BBC news talking about how we should be worried about stereptyping girls and boys with pink and blue colours.

For a start I have heard the story a thousand times (life's a re-write) but secondly it just does not seem important when we at war, in a deep recession and our heads of states are meeting to try and avert the end of the world.

General news suddenly makes no sense.  A bit like after an earthquake when everyone gets an attack of what'sthepoint-ism.

And no - I don't know the answer!

Press Release: Newspapers and PR

When I was a lad.....no honestly! When I was lad on newspapers in "the old days" it was rare to use a press release unless it had come from a major organisation - police, fire, council, utility.

The press releases went on a pile until fillers, or grout as it was sometimes known, were needed to fill the space around the major stories.

Sadly today, and I speak as a PR, newspapers rely on press release fodder to fill the papers.  A lot of PROs are ex-journos so the quality of the average press release has gone up in my opinion.  But it is a pact with the devil. At the end of the day the PR is there to protect reputation and enhance the standing of their client.  With police or local authority they are there to firefight and "communicate". The client is always number one.

We used to have a joke in the newsroom way back that a story was "too good to check"!  It was tongue in cheek of course but now stories supplied by PRs on a regular basis drop in to the paper without a thorough check.  The releases are taken as 100% reliable.  While I am not saying that blatant untruths are peddled it does raise the temptation to exaggerate a tad.

Journos should question everything they receive.  The lines are blurring and it is Joe Public who suffers.  There's never been a better time to get away with something.

Press Release: handshake

The art of the handshake.  Does it mean anything anymore?  What's it for?  Where does it come from?  Do we like doing it?  mmmm. Not really. let's wave instead!!

press release: Murdoch grunts and google parps

Wow.  Just goes to show that the news dinosaur Murdoch still has a roar.  His rant about free news on the internet seems to have hit home with Google with their latest announcement that they plan to limit ranking all free news.

Could this be the beginning of a new partnership.  Has google got into bed with Rupert?  Makes you wonder.

Reports in the Media Guardian say Google is to allow publishers of paid for content to limit the amount of free access internet users have to their websites from Google News.

The move comes after Murdoch's recent rant against google running aggregate news for free.  Theft as he put it!

However, Google say publishers would be able to charge for their content and still make it available via Google following the changes announced. Mmmmm. We'll see.....

Press release: Rolling news

Rolling news is just getting too daft.  Too many hours of broadcast time and not enough people to do it.  The journos are so busy standing there talking endlessly to camera that they don't have the time to do a proper journos job - ie check the facts, pull the story together.  Instead its rambling hyperbole to dress up the same pictures as there is not enough staff to get the latest.

Just look at the flood story.  The same pics endlessly repeated, the same rolling news reporter spewing out the same endless words on every quarter hour.

Where's the story behind the story. The only development comes when the police, fire, ambulance etc release a press statement.  Where's the contacts?  Where's the exclusives?  Drone drone drone..........

Press release: Free papers

Surely the time has come for regional papers to grasp the nettle and go free like the Evening Standard.  Some of the readership figures kicking around are staggering. I don't think advertisers realise how few people are reading them.

I won't pick on anyone but imagine a local daily paper that sold say 70k copies on average a day 20 years ago.  The chances are that the figure is now more like 35 to 40k and the graph is down.

To fight back against the internet they need to cover everything that moves at a local level and go free.  Distribute to all the newsagents who give it away.  They can charge a higher fee than they used to for delivery and they get the kick back of people coming in the shop.

Advertisers will love.  Struggling newspapers can get back on the agenda of national brand advertisers who will not go near a paper unless its shifting 50k a day.

They should do it now instead of re-arranging deck chairs on the titanic.

Press Release: Petrol

At last a paper has picked up the petrol price story again.  The story dropped off the agenda when prices went down a bit but now they are more than when the papers were going nuts about it.  It looks like 1.10 a litre by next week.  The Daily Mail has finally picked up the baton.

The Sun could have done it and used as an example of how crap the country is to hit Brown instead of their clumsy handling of the "letter" story which was a classic example in how to kick your own arse.  Brown came out well - even rank and file soldiers were impressed that a serving PM could be bothered to handwrite their own letter!

Hopefully the petrol story will get some mileage - get it - and shame the oil companies and petrol retailers!  Damn well shame!!!!

Press Release: Gordon Brown

Gordon Brown took a hammering over the soldier letter the other day.  Harshly in my view.  The Sun stitched him up good and proper.  At the end of the day he hand-wrote the letter which is more than most ministers would do.

He made a genuine error and The Sun went to town.  Recording the private telephone follow-up conversation was also bang out of order.  They made capital out of a grieving mother.

Press Release: Paying for online news

Murdoch admits the plan by News International to start charging for online content is falling behind.  The plan was to start charging in June 10 - not a chance.

No surprise really.  When they do their hit rate will fall off a cliff.  He is talking to other news organisations about doing it together which is the only way will manage it.

Should be interesting to see how Joe Public takes to it.  Meanwhile News Corp announced a surge in profit thanks to the TV stations performing well in the US.

The longer the recession the more we sit on our backside and watch TV!  No wonder pubs and restaurants are feeling the pain.

Days like today are when we need the BBC. What commercial station, especially radio, would give so much airtime over to debate the latest on MPs expenses. News on commercial radio stations is virtually non-existent. Skeleton staff run a few soundbites on the hour with bought-in news from agencies. The beeb may not be perfect but with local newspapers losing their investigative bite through poor resources its up to them to have a go.

Sadly the beeb cut back a lot of its regional programming last year so there is less investigative work being done. But something is better than nothing.