The Wardman Wire

There are some good pieces in the Media section of the Independent that are worth a look today. Here is my summary and notes, including some catching up with the rest of us from new media guru Andrew Keen.

Council Newspapers

Stephen Glover writes about a trend for more frequent free Council Newspapers :

Several London boroughs have taken to distributing these doleful freesheets more frequently, and others are intending to do so. Council publications in Lambeth, Hackney, Waltham Forest and Havering have gone from being monthly to fortnightly, and Hammersmith and Fulham is planning to follow suit. Greenwich will soon have a weekly title. No doubt more and more councils inside and outside London will be turning themselves into publishers.

Hammersmith is interesting in that list - they are committed to vigorous cost control. I’d be interested to hear more. Stephen Glover gets quite cross:

This is surely an abuse of state power, albeit on so small a scale that it has barely provoked any criticism, though The Newspaper Society, which represents regional and local newspapers, is up in arms. If the Government were to start producing publications to rival the national press, there would be an outcry; when the same thing happens on a local level it is deemed acceptable behaviour.

Local newspapers are more trusted than national ones, and they are often more able to influence decisions. Yet, most politicians and national newspaper journalists are remarkably blasé, and often condescending, about them. They pay lip service to the importance of the role of the local press in ensuring democratic accountability, but, while there are countless agonised pieces about the decline of national newspapers, the much more drastic problems of local titles are scarcely mentioned.

Given the dire straits in which local newspapers currently exist, he may be right.

BBC iPlayer

Not the most interesting article to me, but some interesting statistics buried in there:

The original iPlayer was launched in December of last year; since then it has recorded over 100m requests for programmes, with 21.8m requests in May alone – an average of 700,000 per day.

Given that that is “requests for programmes”, and assuming no statistical shenanigans, 21.8 million requests in May is a lot.

“It’s basically just a webpage on the BBC website, www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer , where, within a few clicks, you can get all of the BBC’s video and audio programming,”

Really? OK. A challenge - where’s Test Match Special? I haven’t found it, but I’m open to guidance.

There’s a certain amount of “yes, we really do want to sound like Internet dweebs doing marketing” going on:

• “It is the beginning of a set of fantastic personalisation pieces that we’ll be putting in over the next few months.”
• “It’s a completely new model that emerges on the internet that will supplant existing models.”

Cricket Journalists

And there’s (hooray!) a two-pager on Cricket Journalists:

Top players of spin: The inside story on cricket’s press corps

A Lord’s Test match means that cricket’s press corps is obligedto work inside an extraordinary eyrie that has been dubbed ‘Cherie Blair’s mouth’.

Lawrence Booth (14 articles on the Guardian website in the last fortnight) will be annoyed; they missed him out (Boo!).

Odds and Sods

There’s also the latest installment of Matthew Norman’s Gaunt-o-Thon (I’m tempted to borrow the Liberal Conspiracy search term, but Gaunty might not like it), and a two pager about Channel 4 News.

Back to New Media. Andrew Keen has discovered Mogulus, eventually. Mike Rouse wrote a column about Mogulus on the Wardman Wire last October - eons ago in internet time. Keep up, Andrew - you’re reading the wrong sources. And - while I’m at it - any chance of a native search facility on your blog?

Next week … the Future with a Twist on how Google is going to be a big success story one day.