The Independent on Sunday today contains an article that seeks to justify its editor-in-chief’s famous scepticism about new media.
Looking at the Telegraph’s multimedia newsroom, Tim Luckhurst says it’s working well, but wonders whether the Telegraph’s readership really cares. Despite its Hitwise claims, the Telegraph lags behind the Times and Guardian in online readership among the quality newspapers. Moreover, he notes, nobody seems to commenting on the Telegraph blogs. And the bloggers themselves don’t seem to be very enthusiastic, having failed, in some cases, to post for weeks on end.
Then come the quotes from various unnamed sources, including a “leading web site editor” and a Telegraph correspondent, who appear to share the Indy scepticism about newspapers blogging, podcasting and video.
And then, in the final paragraph, comes the Independent view:
It is already clear that Telegraph readers appreciate web coverage that emulates the content of a traditional newspaper. That is excellent news for newspapers in general, but it does not prove that rushing to embrace each new item of technology makes editorial or commercial sense. Waiting and watching has often been the astute response to revolutionary technology. Those who pioneer multimedia may not be the ones to do it best.
Judging by various interviews with editor-in-chief Simon Kelner and chief executive Ivan Fallon over the past few years, this seems to reflect the Indy’s position. Fallon has predicted problems for the Telegraph’s integration efforts. The Independent’s strategy seems to be that it will deliberately lag behind the other quality papers online, leave innovation to others, and then pick and chose which new media approaches to emulate. In his interview with the Guardian, Kelner said:
We’re happy not being pioneers, because it means we won’t get shot in the back. Our approach has been – and will be for the near future – that we’ll go about things more steadily, we’re not going to rush headlong into massive investment.
The Indy, of course, sees its online foot-dragging as a hard-headed businesses decision. Newspapers-printed-on-newsprint, they like to stress, are still booming globally (a valid point for a newspaper group with major interests in growing economies like South Africa and India), and they have sat backed and watched as their traditional rivals have invested millions into their web sites. The Times this year spent £10m on a web relaunch, and the Guardian will spend another £15m on its site over the next 18 months. Kelner, by contrast, can boast that his more humble web site is at least profitable — and increasing the revenue it generates significantly.
But if the Independent’s short-lived experiment with blogging is anything to go by, there is, of course no guarantee that this approach will be successful. The innovators will be way ahead, having learned what doesn’t work as well as what does. Those who follow the pioneers will have to reinvent the wheel every time.
Perhaps it’s most telling that the corner of Independent News & Media’s UK empire that makes all the money — the Belfast Telegraph — is not as reluctant about multimedia integration as the flagship in London.
An irate reader’s voicemail left with the San Francisco Chronicle has become a bizarre Internet hit, proving that the green ink brigade is expanding into new media as rapidly as the journalists they harangue.
The paper’s new reader-feedback podcast Correct Me If I’m Wrong features a voicemail from a pedant outraged by Chronicle subs’ failure to spot the redundancy “pilotless drone”.
The rant, which goes on and on for nearly two minutes, is directed at a Mr Howe (possibly the paper’s business editor Ken Howe) about an article about civilian spy planes that ran in the paper on a Monday, 29 August.
First the reader rebukes Howe for his prolix construction.
“It says ‘unmanned aerial vehicle’ — the word ‘drone’ is what you should have had in there,” he rails.
But then it gets more aggressive: “The subhead is a tautology: it says ‘Forest Service begins testing a pilotless drone.’ Mr Howe! Is there any other kind of drone? You tell me right now! Is there any other kind of drone? Drone? Drone? Anything other than a pilotless drone? Isn’t that what a drone is? An unmanned aircraft? Don’t you check these things? Don’t you supervise the subeditors who write these headlines? Don’t you do your job? Aren’t you there to ensure that the English language isn’t pissed on by your subeditors? There’s no such thing as a non-pilotless drone! They’re all pilotless drones! That’s the definition of drone! Pilotless airplane! Pilotless airplane! Drone! Not pilotless drone! Drone, drone, drone! Get it? is it sinking into your thick skull, you high school dropout?”
Prompted by a post on the technology blog Engadget, the phone call has been remixed, hilariously set to music and video and of course, posted to YouTube. Even a ringtone version for mobile phones has appeared.
The launch edition of a podcast going viral online is almost too good to be true, and the conspiracy theories are already beginning in the blogosphere.
Strangely, the article that prompted the torrent of abuse is impossible to find on the SFGate web site. As one reader of the Freakonomics blog points out, a clue in the call suggests that the recording dates from 2005, the last time 29 August fell on a Monday.
Or the grammarian might just have got his dates wrong. If it was from 2005, the call probably referred to an Associated Press report published one week earlier than he suggested. And in late August, 2006, other California news sources reported the impending test deployment of a Forest Service drone.
It seems the Chronicle, seeking to maximise the impact of its podcast launch, cleverly dug out a recording that has been an internal source of amusement for months.