the guardian's dying

semi-pro waster said:
While it might be fun to watch the Guardian squirm if you're taking a slightly longer term view I don't think this is a good thing - it tends to be better if there's a variety of opinions across the political spectrum available. I don't much care whether you like right or left leaning papers or something else entirely but a lack of competition will usually lead to poorer quality available to customers - you might think that the options are poor now but they're only likely to get worse where there's less choice to keep them honest (for want of a better phrase) and standards will probably slip across the board.

As for £2 surcharge for the broadband providers - it's not something that would bother me terribly, if it goes towards supporting journalism then fine. I would however hope that it would come with some conditions for funding that would mean fewer adverts and if possible more investigative pieces (for instance) rather than having it just diverted to paying for paparazzi pictures of some D-lister with her top off.



If popularity is a measure of quality then X-Factor has to be good by that metric? I'd argue it's dross designed to appeal to a mass-market while having the benefits of being cheap to produce and the ability to derive multiple additional revenue streams but then again - what do I know?
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While the last bit is correct the former is absurd, its about where and now people are getting news not needing a balanced political spectrum or needing to support journalists. The Guardian is poorly run, its making a £75million loss when it shouldn't be, its a business, if readership is down, get rid of people, and don't give yourself a half million fee for running a business into the ground.

People aren't not reading news, they just aren't buying ackward print media, they are getting it online. As said in that article they are asking you to pay for old news because thats what the print media is. Go online, stop printing newspapers people aren't buying, etc, etc. We shouldn't be propping up companies that don't move with the times. People do not want printed newspapers anymore and we should NEVER levy a tax to prop up an unwanted industry. Should we have had every DVD have a £2 levy on it to prop up the guys who produced VHS's? its the same content on a different medium... no, because that would have been insane also.

Print media is dead the fact is if we all paid £500million collectively to keep the Guardian in print, people still wouldn't read it. Its anti competitive, everyone pays £2 for it every month, it may aswell be a forced subscription to every newspaper... but I don't want it.

Their argument is democracy needs a free media... it does, it doesn't need a free PRINT media, that same free media(in general its MORE free of censorship online) is available eslewhere.
 
If The Guardian thinks so many people are willing to pay to read it online, then change it to a subscription only site and charge £2 a month.

Rather than dragging their heels, they should pioneer new innovations with the move to online and mobile. The demand for good journalism still remains, newspapers just have to publish it less traditional means.
 
drunkenmaster said:
People aren't not reading news, they just aren't buying ackward print media, they are getting it online. As said in that article they are asking you to pay for old news because thats what the print media is. Go online, stop printing newspapers people aren't buying, etc, etc. We shouldn't be propping up companies that don't move with the times.

Snipped the rest for space.
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I'd have to argue with the old news tag, good investigative journalism (how much we've seen of that recently is debateable) doesn't always have to be contemporaneous to be interesting and worthwhile yet it's rarely a cheap thing to do. Maybe people don't want that from their papers any more and certainly don't care to pay for it so if that's the case then I'll have to accept I'm in a minority on that one but it seems a bit of a shame. I'm well aware that newspapers can be cumbersome, slower to react than other formats and inconvenient in any number of ways yet I prefer them to online sources when reading for pleasure in the same way that I don't like e-books.
 
bhavv said:
I dont even know why people pay for newspapers. I just use my PC / Smartphone.
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Most people don't. That's why all of them are losing money. I believe the closest any come to making money is the Daily Mail. The other papers all only exist because they are part of larger business empires which are propped up by other concerns. The Grauniad is in more trouble than most because the company which owns it has most of its money in newspapers, all of which are suffering.

But most people think like you: why pay for a newpaper, when you can get the news for free? But all "free" news is supplied by organisations which get money from elsewhere: the BBC being the classic example. Of course many on the Right would argue that actually you do pay for the BBC news. All of which is fine as long as the owners are happy to fund the free news side, but most would love to get out of it, and provide only news which is paid for. But it's basic economics: until everyone gets out of free news, no one will. In the meantime, the "free" news services from the big papers are bleeding even more capital out of the owners, on top of the losses coming from printing a newspaper.

But the one big difference between the two formats is that only printed papers do in-depth news. On-line free newspapers just give you a summary. That's fine for those who don't care, and there are enough who do care to support the pay services. But the news in depth is important - there are far too many people whose understanding of an important issue is a mixture of headlines and bias. The Guardian's idea is silly, and is never going to happen, but the continuing loss of quality of the current newspapers (because quality costs money) will increase, and a couple at least will go under. How important you consider this depends on whether you think a well-informed electorate is a good idea or not.
 
UncleRuckus said:
Surely that nobody is buying it would indicate that there's a strong correlation that it is indeed; crap?
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its more down to the fact its more intellectual if you ask me. which to be fair, most this country aim for celeb trash and boobs.

Have you tried the crossword in the guardian? ha, i bet most people wouldnt know where to begin :D
 
Printed media on the whole is in decline, it should hardly be surprising.

It has nothing to do with the political preference of the nation changing.

While I'm not the biggest fan of the Guardian (I prefer on-line free news) it's vastly preferably to The Sun/Daily Mail.
 
simulatorman said:
Because it's nice to be able to fold a page, get the full picture, be comfortable reading and of course to do a crossword puzzle.
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Aha. It'd be a sad day when / if everything goes digital. "daddy, what's a newspaper?" :(.

The Guardian ceasing to print would be a dire day for journalism, it's one of the very few papers that aren't complete and utter crap.
 
I can imagine the "I" is doing well, I'm lucky if I can even get a copy after after 10am in the petrol stations around here. It seems to get straight to the point and whilst there's information in real time on the net, there's something about flicking through a apaper that I haven't got tired of.
 
Hang on a minute, this guy has a really good point:

“A small levy on UK broadband providers – no more than £2 a month on each subscriber’s bill – could be distributed to news providers in proportion to their UK online readership. This would solve the financial problems of quality newspapers, whose readers are not disappearing, but simply migrating online. There are almost 20m UK households that are paying upwards of £15 a month for a good broadband connection, plus another 5m mobile internet subscriptions. People willingly pay this money to a handful of telecommunications companies, but pay nothing for the news content they receive as a result, whose continued survival is generally agreed to be a fundamental plank of democracy. A £2 levy on top – collected easily from the small number of UK service providers (BT, Virgin, Sky, TalkTalk etc) who would add it on to consumers’ bills – would raise more than £500 million annually. It could be collected by a freestanding agency, on the lines of the BBC licence fee, and redistributed automatically to “news providers” according to their share of UK online readership.”

It is true that newspapers (and news journalism in general) is suffering as their revenue streams dry up. It is also true this is a bad thing! Having great networks, like the Internet, but nothing but rubbish, shallow content, is no good at all.

The question is how do we guarantee good content, which will cost, when the distribution is essentially free? A fee on broadband connections to fund journalism makes at least as much sense as the TV licence to fund the BBC. In fact I think it makes more sense!

Also note - this isn't a Guardian specific thing, this would benefit all news papers and as a result everyone else.
 
elmarko1234 said:
Printed media on the whole is in decline, it should hardly be surprising.

It has nothing to do with the political preference of the nation changing.

While I'm not the biggest fan of the Guardian (I prefer on-line free news) it's vastly preferably to The Sun/Daily Mail.
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Indeed - but how do we fund "on-line free news"? If we don't bother, or just let it rely on ads, the quality will be awful. Good journalism costs. When physically distributed money can be collected at the point of sale - that doesn't really work on-line though. So an alternative method of funding is required.
 
The Guardian's on my list of regular news & commentary sources, and I'd like to support it. But I've no interest in paying the kind of money they -- and all other online sites -- tend to charge for full registered access. The fees might be fair compared to the cost of buying a paper every day, but I'm nearly 50 and as a Radio4 addict have never bought a newspaper or magazine regularly, so that metric doesn't work for me.

Sites like PCPro and The Guardian could easily persuade me to part with £1 a month for some sort of limited access to their sites (I'm not interested in most of the content on either anyway) but I'm not sure that kind of fee structure would work for them when all overheads are taken into consideration, even if there's an argument for saying anything's better than nothing.

I could probably be persuaded by the merits of a small broadband levy to support a diverse "digital news infrastructure", but how you'd choose who gets what fairly -- and not just by hit count -- is beyond me. So I think all sites have no alternative to get a lot bolder with their pricing strategies or go out of business.
 
What about all the news that people get from digital news services run overseas, what about the popular blogs? Should we be subsidising news in this country if we aren't using it?


In any case, it is possible to run a newspaper for (small) profit in a digital age, the financial times is a prime example of that.
 
By the way, to all the folks yapping about good journalism, take it this way...When you find terrible journalism in a newspaper or such, you become rather irritated.

However with the internet, you realise that already that it is probably bad, so you don't feel any different reading such things, but it makes you appreciate the good articles on the internet far more.

A good example was on Hard talk, a supposedly serious discussion forum on the BBC news, when the reporter/presenter whatever, was constantly getting it wrong, citing other media and such rather than the source, 'twas an awesome looking German Economist on, forgot his name, but had a nice beard.

Either way, it was just laughable.
 
Great, the only newspaper on the left with the editorial clout to stand up to Murdoch's press corp will be... Gone. I can't believe that people are actually stupid enough to think that this is a good thing.

Could someone please explain to me, without sounding like an idiot, why it's a good thing that there will be an overabundance of print media on the right, without a counter on the left? Thanks.
 
Naffa said:
Great, the only newspaper on the left with the editorial clout to stand up to Murdoch's press corp will be... Gone. I can't believe that people are actually stupid enough to think that this is a good thing.

Could someone please explain to me, without sounding like an idiot, why it's a good thing that there will be an overabundance of print media on the right, without a counter on the left? Thanks.
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Because we have the BBC for that.
 
The worst case is when you have a total political media monopoly like in Australia.

Do we really want Murdoch to take in an even greater proportion of the population under his political wing?.

Private corporations are not fit for news - as the financial incentive undermines the base integrity of the profession, but neither is the state (as it has the propensity to be bias in favour of the current government).

What's needed is a news stream which is neither private or state funded, then we might actually get some news worthwhile.

Tabloids are for idiots (left wing or right wing ones), that much I'm sure we can all agree on.

Any newspaper (I'll have to use The Sun as an example as it's sitting across me now during the office) which has story's about X-Factor judges on the front page really does indicate how stupid the people who read it really are.
 
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