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By Injera, on December 11th, 2009%
News Ltd has a complicated relationship with the internet. On one hand, they seem to view bloggers and tweeters as news parasites, stealing their hard-won, quality content for snarky posts. And then there’s Google, aggregating news so that we freeloaders can read it without annoying popup ads. In order to stop this online anarchy, Rupert Murdoch proposes charging for access to News’ online content:
Quality journalism is not cheap. The digital revolution has opened many new and inexpensive distribution channels but it has not made content free. We intend to charge for all our news websites.
Did he say “quality journalism”? I would pay for quality journalism, however I don’t see much evidence of that in Murdoch’s publications. In fact, I don’t see much of it in local papers – printed or online – at all. If Fairfax joins News in charging for online access, I’ll be no less informed than I currently am. I’ll continue to get my news from the ABC, the BBC, the Guardian and the New York Times. If the non-government news providers join in and start charging for access, I might consider paying for the Guardian and the NYT. Would I miss out on local news? No, the ABC has it covered.
But this is old news, I hear you say. Why’s she banging on about this now? Well, there’s the “other hand”, the one that News likes to bite, but still expects to receive food from. A couple of weeks ago, during the exciting days of the Liberal party leadership meltdown, #spill on Twitter was a vital source of gossip and updates. What quality content did the Herald-Sun come up with for it’s online coverage? They pulled a bunch of tweets and published them. How do I know this, when I scrupulously avoid reading the Hun these days? I received this from a fellow tweeter:
I see you got quotes on the Herald-Sun website in their Abbott-Twitter story!
Yep. One line from a long twitter exchange with @teacoffeetea was taken out of context and dumped in a Hun story. The fact that it didn’t make sense in isolation only further illustrates the Hun’s limited understanding of the medium. And, as much as I like to think that my observations are all gold, pure gold, I’d be hoping for more if I were to pay for the content.
By Injera, on November 17th, 2009%
I feel as though I’ve been drifting for a while here1 with no real purpose. Part of that I’m going to attribute to seasonal motivational fluctuations (I’m sure that’s a thing), but that can’t be the whole of it. For a (very brief) moment I was considering participating in NaBloPoMo (a post a day, all month – the bloggers’ equivalent to NaNoWriMo2) – a bit of discipline might be handy, even in recreation – but the moment passed. Even as I hovered my mouse over the sign-up button, though, I knew that doing it would result in half a dozen desultory posts of this nature, and then back to random intermittence. That’s defined as lose-lose, whichever way you look at it.
Perhaps that’s why I decided to move the blog – a [virtual] change is as good as a [virtual] holiday? Except that… a [virtual] holiday is about as refreshing as you’d expect it to be.
So, this is all by way of saying: a new address hasn’t magically jump-started my motivation to write. In lieu of being refreshing and original, then, I’m going to rant about Larissa Dubecki’s latest restaurant review to save you the frustration of having to read it.
More, after the jump (which is after the footnotes).
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1. “Here” is a vague concept, of course. I’ve only just come here, but… well, you know what I mean.
2. Unlike NaNoWriMo, however, NaBloPoMo happens every month, so I’ve got a chance to not do it twelve times a year.
Continue reading Settling in
By injera, on August 6th, 2009%
It’s a happy coincidence that combining the words “Twitter” and “haters” results in a variant of the word “Twat”. That was the word I uttered after reading Rebecca Wilson’s column on Twitter today.
Wilson hates Twitter because, unlike “Facebook and blogs (which) appear to serve some useful purpose, Twitter just does not – it is puerile, inane and a shocking waste of time”. Moreover, Twitter users are “vacuous people with too much time on their hands who like to believe we actually care what they are doing”. Wilson has a column where she is paid to spout her own vapid opinions, but she resents the fact that Twitter allows everybody to do the same. She seems particularly peeved that tweets are limited to a character count (she doesn’t seem to be able to settle on whether that count is 140 or 160), although I doubt she’d prefer more extensive “blow-by-blow descriptions” of the “tedium and uselessness” of the lives of people she obviously despises. (How somebody can be “turgid” within 140 characters is a mystery.) Perhaps it’s because she can’t summarise her own vacuousness to the form that Twitter is, to her, “the single most hideous technological breakthrough of the past decade” (she’s never tried Microsoft Songsmith, then, but that’s another story).
Continue reading Twaters
By injera, on June 15th, 2009%
John Elder has never been one of my favourite writers at The Age. If I notice his name in the byline, I generally skip the story. If I start reading one of his articles without realising, the over-wrought prose generally turns me off within the first couple of paragraphs and a glance at the byline confirms why. I never miss anything of any importance by not reading his work – the stories are usually of the “human interest” type, where “human interest” is defined as “of interest to nobody but John Elder”.
I missed the byline on the Sunday Age article “Swine Flu Fears Not To Be Sneezed At”, but the name of the writer was repeated in the first line. For some reason I kept reading.
Continue reading Swine flu fears and the meeja
By injera, on April 27th, 2009%
As a “bonus” with Saturday’s Age, we received a copy of
theage
(melbourne)
magazine
There’s an awful lot to dislike in this shiny, inconveniently sized publication. Earnest lower case titles, random use of contrasting colours, and enthusiastically misplaced brackets are only a small part of the problem.
Continue reading Oh, no – another whinge about the paper
By injera, on April 5th, 2009%
Buying the weekend newspapers is nothing more than a habit for me now that the “news” is available online. It’s a habit I just can’t seem to break, even though they aggravate more than they enlighten me. The Sunday Age is the worst culprit, with its supplements that skew nauseatingly to the “women’s magazines” end of the market. Usually, I flip through the “Life” and the “M” and rant to my partner. With him away, I’m reduced to this. Blogging a whinge.
So, what are the things I hate most?
Continue reading Things I hate most about The Sunday Age (and something I like)
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