Category: Media

It seems that the Evening Standard’s great idea for fighting Murdoch’s new thelondonpaper is to put the Standard’s price up by 10p to 50p. The thinking behind this is that this gives them a £7m warchest somehow (At 300,000 copies daily x 10p x 5 days a week that’s £150,000 a week which means it’s…

Mediaguardian had the founders of Bebo in the other day answering questions. I’ve mentioned in the past that Bebo – enormously popular among kids – has some inappropriate advertising. So I asked about this and was given a very fair answer.

The battle for London newspapers is really warming up now, with news that to combat News International’s thelondonpaper, Associated my morph the currently free lunchtime Standard Lite into London Lite and extend it’s distribution to take it head to head with the thelondonpaper. Like thelondonpaper, it too is going to be distributed by hand –…

Lots of news keeps coming out about News International’s new free evening newspaper – thelondonpaper (yes – it’s all lower case seemingly). It’s going to be distributed, at least initially, by a team of 700 people in zone 1 of London. They’re talking about 400,000 papers a day. Because Transport for London has yet to…

I was wondering only the other day when G24, the Guardian’s new print on demand PDF service would start. Well it seems to have started today. I’ve got to say that is a great idea, and just right for commuters and people at lunchtime. If it’s automated, then all the better. The content already exists…

Last week, when I was bemoaning overly-abridged audio books I noted that The Times was claiming to be giving an unabridged audiobook of Stormbreaker, but pointed out that it couldn’t really get a 240 page book into 78 minutes. Well today it became clear that they were giving out an mp3 audiobook. Full marks for…

Mediaguardian published their list of the most powerful 100 people in the industry today. As usual you get the feeling that the contributors had more fun putting it together than anything and it’s all a bit meaningless. But what I find really strange is that despite putting less usual entries in previous lists (for example,…

Audiobooks seem like they’re the new drug that newspapers are using to give brief boosts to their ABCs. In particular the Times stable is using them quite a bit. Chocolat was in last week’s Sunday Times, today sees Captain Corelli’s Mandolin in The Times, while tomorrow the Sunday Times has a “unique” version of Eats,…

I know that it’s practically the job description for newspaper columnists to spout complete nonsense, but Janet Street-Porter really annoyed me in today’s Independent On Sunday. (I’d link to the article, but the brief intro you can get on the Indie’s website doesn’t include it. Brilliantly, The Indie charges a pound for a single article…

The Guardian are launching yet another very smart online initiative. You’ll be able to go online to The Guardian’s site and print on demand a PDF news document that’s updated throughout the day every fifteen minutes. By choosing from five areas (general news, international, economics, sport and media) you’ll end up with a 8-12 document…

Blair on 606? Oh dear… They Think It’s All Over ends. Having caught a recent “World Cup” episode this really hasn’t come soon enough.

Don’t you just hate that word? Brilliant. Well, not the word, so much as its constant misuse in the media. These days everything sounds like it’s a sketch from The Fast Show. Brilliant! Now I know I’m not completely immune from using the word, but more often than not, I’m using it ever so slightly…

The British Library has a new exhibition at the moment called The Front Page. It’s a retrospective of around 100 front pages from British (well, I reckon English actually, since I didn’t see any papers from outside of London, with the possible exception of the Manchester Guardian) newspapers from the last 100 years. It’s fascinating…