Tag Archives: Newspapers

Trinidad’s tabloids scream loudly, but Barbados’ press could do with some balls

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John Mair is a senior lecturer in broadcasting at Coventry University. He was born in Guyana and regularly returns there to help build local media, print and TV. Previous posts looked at the Caricom Summit held July 2-5 in Georgetown. Trinidad and Barbados were the final stops.

After experiencing Guyanese ‘journalism’ during the Caricom summit, any order is better. In Trinidad, there is much economic prosperity due to oil and natural gas: ‘What recession?’ they ask here. The economy is healthy but the society has some of the fissures of Guyana.

Trinidad politics
Indians were brought here in thousands as indentured labourers to replace the freed black slaves one hundred and seventy years ago. They live in the south of the island, the African Trinidadians in the North. They have much of the wealth, the prime minister and his ruling PNM party are black and have the political power.

There is much violent crime – especially kidnappings and murders – and that is the staple fare of the super tabloids who make up the Trinidad & Tobago newspaper market. The Guardian, the Express and Newsday are much the same. Screaming headlines on the cover but much content inside. They are big in pagination and include lots of classified ads.

Politics gets a big shout and through that the racial dimension. The leader of the opposition (at the moment) Basdeo Panday is Indo-Trinidadian. He was prime minister until 2001 but was driven from office for alleged corruption. Today his UNC is breaking into bits.

His former attorney general Ramesh Marhaj is leading a ginger group/internal opposition within the party together with another MP – Jack Warner, who runs football in this part of the world, is vice-chair of FIFA and has been the subject of critical investigations on British TV about his dodgy behaviour in that job.

Warner’s son sold the travel packages and tickets for Trinidadians to the to the 2006 World Cup. Panday wants Warner to account for $30m (T&T) of election expenses. Warner says it was money he gave the party so no need to account. This makes the British MPs look tame.

Columnists abound on the pages of the T&T press. Different races. All have views. Many far too prolix for the page. Sub-editing is not a craft that seems to have been found in the Southern Caribbean. But the three dailies and the local TV news programmes – sadly also divided on racial lines – make for lively reading and listening. Crime sells. They certainly put the fear of God into the bank manager cousin with whom I was staying.

Keeping awake in Barbados
Not so Barbados. The problem here for a journalist is keeping awake. The best description for the Barbados Nation and Advocate? Stodgy, boring, dull. They make the Bedworth Advertiser look interesting. Boring headlines and even duller stories. It is like reading a parish newsletter for a nation.

The ‘news’ is based on government news conferences and other press conferences by NGOs and the like. On such sexy subjects like polyclinics, insurance and diabetes. Again, writing is prolix and not of great quality.

Barbados is a very polite and ordered society (the murder rate is a fraction of Trinidad’s) and that shows in its press. The hacks need to get themselves some more balls. The TV news is not much better.

There we have it. Prosperity, tabloid culture, Little England and the news values of British suburbia. Funny how they all travel. But Blighty calls.

A wee exit roll call for Scottish journalists

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Scottish media news site allmediascotland.com is attempting to catalogue all professionals who have lost their jobs from Scottish newspapers as a result of the economic downturn, and is urging readers to collaborate with their project – so we’d thought we’d give it a shout out.

Whether you are staff journalists who has left your job or been made redundant from a Scottish newspaper; or a freelancer whose income has been affected by budget cuts, contact allmediascotland.com on info [at] allmediascotland.com by December 31 to let them know what position you used to occupy and what you are doing now.

Guardian exclusive claims Murdoch papers ‘paid £1m to gag phone-hacking victims’

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On Guardian.co.uk, Nick Davies reports: “Rupert Murdoch’s News Group Newspapers has paid out more than £1m to settle legal cases that threatened to reveal evidence of his journalists’ repeated involvement in the use of criminal methods to get stories.”

Full story at this link…

A guide to newspapers on Twitter

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National newspapers have a total of 1,068,898 followers across their 120 official Twitter accounts – with the Guardian, Times and FT the only three papers represented in the top ten.

The Guardian’s the clear winner, as @GuardianTech’s place on Twitter’s Suggested User List means it has 831,935 followers – 78 per cent of the total. @GuardianNews is 2nd with 25,992, @TimesFashion 3rd with 24,762 and @FinancialTimes 4th with 19,923.

Complete list of national newspaper Twitter accounts

Other findings:

  • Glorified RSS Out of 121 accounts, just 19 do something other than running as a glorified RSS feed. The other 114 do no retweeting, no replying to other tweets etc. (The 19 are the ones with a blue background in their URL and a yes in the last column).
  • No following. They don’t do much following. Leaving GuardianTech out of it, there are 236,963 followers of these accounts, but they follow just 59,797. Are newspapers bringing their no-linking-out approach to Twitter? Or is it just because they’re pumping RSS feeds straight to Twitter, and therefore see no reason to engage with the community?
  • Rapid drop-off There are only six Twitter accounts with more than 10,000 followers. I suspect many of these accounts are invisible to most people as the newspapers aren’t engaging much – no RTing of other people’s tweets means those other people don’t have an obvious way to realise the newspaper accounts exist.
  • Sun and Mirror are laggards The Sun and Mirror have a lot of work to do – they have few accounts with any followers. And they don’t promote their Twitter accounts on their sites. The Mail only seems to have one account but it is the 20th largest in terms of followers.

More on newspaper Twitter accounts:

Some papers publish lists of their Twitter accounts:

Other useful places:

  • Newspaper people on Twitter from mediaUK
  • Newspaper titles on Twitter (inc local) from mediaUK
  • Twitian – a list of people at the Guardian who use Twitter (and their latest tweets), created by Paul Carvill.
  • #followjourn – a daily recommendation service from Journalism.co.uk.

This post originally appeared on MacolmColes.co.uk.

Oh the irony… were the Australian’s subs trying to tell us something?

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Australian newspapers aren’t finding it as tough as many of their US and UK counterparts, John Hartigan, the chairman and chief executive of News Ltd, claimed in a speech on Wednesday. Roy Greenslade picked up on the Murdoch-owned Australian newspaper’s report that the nation’s print publications are ‘holding up well’.

But we feel he missed the best bit. As Crikey.com.au flagged up in its daily newsletter, there was something a little odd about a print headline in the paper on July 2 (helpfully highlighted here by Mumbrella.com.au – hat-tip @BlackAdder). This, courtesy of Crikey:

aus

Also see Crikey’s comments on the speech / report here (registration required):

And links and commentary from Mumbrella here.

Oh, and you can ‘Marc the deth of newpapers with this stilish Crikey tee shiort. Avilable now fom the Crickley shop.’

Murdoch’s media musings: the Fox News video

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Rupert Murdoch, in response to Berlusconi, claims he has little editorial influence at his newspapers; talks about the Boston Globe; and gives his view that all newspapers could be delivered digitally in ten years time: see video below.

“What we call newspapers today, I call ‘news organisations’. Journalistic enterprises, if you will. They’re the source of news.”

Save the Media: Imagining a ‘hyperinterest’ approach to online news

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Gina Chen suggests that newspapers embrace two ideas: the mass audience is dead; and the product of newspaper websites is not news.

“Imagine if a newspaper’s web site didn’t look like a news web site at all. Instead, when you entered the site, you faced a question: What do you want to do?  (I’m picturing it almost like Facebook’s ‘What’s on Your Mind?’)”

Full post at this link…

FT.com: Threat to democracy by papers’ travails exaggerated

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In case you missed it, during yesterday’s UK bank holiday, an editorial piece on FT.com made for an interesting read. For example:

“The degree to which the travails of papers are a threat to an informed democracy can be exaggerated, particularly by journalists. The internet has made print less profitable but has also made new forms of information-gathering and commentary possible. Bloggers get a bad press but low-cost publishing helps new sources to emerge.”

(…)

“Nor are all papers equally threatened. Business papers, including the FT, have had more success in charging online readers than general-interest publications. Many publishers regret their rush to give everything away on the web but the over-supply of general news makes it hard to backtrack.”

It concludes: “Perhaps some of the reporting done up to now by for-profit papers will in future be funded by foundations or trusts. But the industry should not lose faith in the free market. When people really want or need something, they will pay for it, one way or another. If today’s publishers cannot convince their readers to do so, they will be overtaken by others that can.”

Full story at this link…

The Economist: Newspapers ‘tossed by the gale’: what does it mean for consumers and the media industry?

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“Perhaps the surest sign that newspapers are doomed is that politicians, so often their targets, are beginning to feel sorry for them,” opens this analytical feature in The Economist.

Yes, the news industry is struggling, but ‘the plight of the news business does not presage the end of news,’ it says. “As large branches of the industry wither, new shoots are rising. The result is a business that is smaller and less profitable, but also more efficient and innovative…”

Full story at this link…