Making online journalism pay

For a good round up of the NUJ's making journalism pay online,take a look at Conrad Quilty-Harper piece at the Online Journalism Blog.

He brings out five pointers

1.that getting to a sustainable position is difficult.

2.The rules of the journalism game aren’t changed by the internet.

3.Traditional media doesn’t do investigative journalism.

4.that the use of Email is important.

5.Local freelance journalism is dying.

The star of the show was political blogger Guido Fawkes who told the conference

I have achieved the Marxist ideal. I own the means of production and distribution. I have job security, I can't be fired and do much better than many journalists."

Why the FT's sales are falling

Guido has his own reasons behind the fall in sales of the FT:

The paper now sells more copies overseas than in the UK – which may explain its fanatically europhile stance. Whereas the core UK readership is from the eurosceptic City and business community, the overseas readership is euo-establishment. Increasingly commuters to the Square Mile are turning to City AM if they are casual consumers of financial news or, if they are need-to-know types, the revamped and strengthened Wall Street Journal.

As Iain Dale also reminds us

Iain Martin's new blog on the WSJ site is fast becoming unmissable. He has launched a one man campaign to hold the Financial Times to account for its apparent anti-Tory bias.

Spectator to hide behind a paywall

Interesting snippet of information from Guido Fawkes yesterday evening.

According to the political blogger, the Spectator magazine

will within weeks be stealing a march on Murdoch and putting up a paywall around the magazine’s online content. The web-only stuff on CoffeeHouse will still be free, but the magazine content will be sold so as not to cannibalise the print edition.

Guido more profitable than the Indy and the Guardian

I see that Guido reckons that his blog is now more profitable than both the Guardian and the Indy following a successful month in which he broke the Damien McBride story.

Writing on his blog today he announces that

April saw a total of over 3.6m pageviews from 1,382,879 visits by 347,994 visitors making 2,995,765 pageviews plus 680,207 views via RSS feed readers. Not bad for one guy with a laptop, Blackberry and a penchant for Guinness. With traffic averaging over 100,000 pageviews daily this blog puts traditional political publications like the New Statesman in the shade,

and adds

Many thanks to you the readers and the advertisers who make this blog more profitable than both the Guardian and Independent combined.

Steve Richards on blogs-they follow the fashion

The creator of the Guido Fawkes website, Paul Staines, is in my view one of the most influential figures in the British media. One day this week I heard five items on the Today programme that followed up his stories or his observations. Politicians have not learnt how to cope with an individual who has as much impact as entire newspapers. He is one of the reasons why Derek Draper, the recipient of McBride's emails, felt the need for a left of centre equivalent.

Steve Richards in the Independent this morning displays the power of political bloggers

Yet he giveth with one hand and taketh with the other.He says that Guido has an easy job he follows the fashion

The easiest column to write is an attack on Brown. You are part of the pack, safely protected by hundreds of other articles and blogs all making the same points and you know you will be showered with praise for your boldness. If anyone writes a defence they will be slaughtered for being tame.

Has the McBride affair changed the course of political blogging

Initially dismissed as irrelevent bickering on the blogosphere by the Labour Party,the Damien McBride resignation shows how political blogging in the UK is now approaching the heights of the power it has across the Atlantic.

The spat between Guido Fawkes,Damien McBride and Derek Draper has come to dominate the news over this Easter weekend.

Ok,it may be partly that this is a slow news few days.Guido has admitted that he deliberately timed the release of the emails to coincide with this weekend.

However this is not the first time that this particular blogger has made the political headlines.Remember the Peter Hain resignation.

Whilst the blogging giants have not yet approached the levels of their American counterparts such as Drudge and the Huffington Post,they have shown that they can now wield influence.

As it stands this weekend,Labour's foray into the blogosphere is in tatters.It is uncertain whether Derek Draper will survive and there are questions over the position of its Digital guru Tom Watson.

More for the power of blogging

I posted the other day on how Guido claimed the power of blogging for the fall of Peter Hain.

Over at Dr Crippin's excellent NHS blog its power is once agian highlighted

Last year, the MTAS computer was finally closed down after revelations by NHS BLOG DOCTOR. Dr Crippen was proud to have played a part in bringing down that invidious system. MTAS may not have reached public consciousness but it affected the life of every young doctor in Britain

However as Dr Crippn points out,he fared a lot worse on newsnight foe which the good doctor blames his being tagged on the end as an an finally spot instead of being in the main debate on Hain.Watching the show,I thought(and sorry Guido) that he was a bit out of his depth.

But then writers don't always make the transition to Tv and radio do they?

The first blogging resignation

Peter Hain's resignation according to Blogger Iain Dale is the first related to a story first broken on a blog

According to Iain

If my recollection is right, it was Guido Fawkes who first broke the story on Peter Hain's campaign funding on the afternoon of 3 December . It was this story which provoked Peter Hain to contact the Electoral Commission. If Guido hadn't run it, would Hain have come forward? I doubt it very much.

You can read Guido's post HERE and his reactions HERE

Update


Cicero's songs has a slightly different take on the state of blogging

Though Guido may feel triumphant, the fact is, that probably 98% of the UK has probably never heard of him. Despite the passion and anger that many bloggers seem to be holding back with extreme difficulty (obviously except Devil's Kitchen who has never knowingly held back anything) the fact is that the audiences are still pretty small

17th Jan -an anniversary for new media

It is 10 years ago today that blogger Matt Drudge broke the story of Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky and Guido salutes the anniversary by saying that

His story ended once and for all the gate-keeper ability, if not the mentality, of the mainstream media elite. He later said "We are all newsmen now."

Guido himself recommends the following three points for bloggers

1 Content. Original relevant content. Go get the story.

2 Don't follow the herd. Have a clear unique online personality.

3.Updating regularly is hard work, if you have nothing new to say, nobody will read you. Link to hot news at least.

I also recommend Steve Borris' piece at Pajamas media on the same issue

The Monica Lewinsky scandal left a stain on the U.S. mainstream media that will never come off, argues Steve Boriss. When Americans witnessed journalistic elites slithering out of their responsibility to call immoral behavior by its name exactly a decade ago, they were never trusted again

Dacre on the way out

Just picked this up from Guido's blog

Rumours are flying around that the dark days of the Dacre regime may be coming to an end at the Daily Mail. The colony of ex-Mail hacks at the Telegraph is speculating feverishly that an announcement could be made as early as next week. Dacre would they believe be moved upstairs, keeping all perks, as is the tradition since Sir David English

Straws in the wind

Guido is reporing that Paul Dacre had breakfast with Gordon Brown on Thursday morning and points out the coincidence that the Mail’s leader praised Alistair Darling’s tax and spending plans.

despite the magpie taunts, it would be utterly wrong to deny that some of Alistair Darling's measures deserve support. Yes, he stole the inheritance tax plans from the Tories and his scheme is nowhere near as generous as he would like us to believe.
But it will free countless Britons from a pernicious tax on aspiration, and marks a Rubicon moment for Labour, which has accepted the right of hard-working people to pass on wealth (on which they have already paid tax) to their children.

Meanwhile in this morning’s Guardian Polly Toynbee turns against Gordon Brown,the straw that broke the camels back being the party’s move on inheritence tax.

This was more than a horrible humiliation for the prime minister. This was the week that social democracy ebbed away in England. Those words had already slipped from Labour's lexicon, never spoken by its leaders in public, rarely spoken outside the privacy of Fabian meetings and Celtic parliaments.
And she continues
To give the children of the well-off a £1.4bn inheritance bonus while the children of the poor only got another 48p a week in tax credits is symbolically far worse than that notorious 75p for pensioners. The halfway mark to abolish child poverty by 2010 will be missed by miles. Holding down public sector pay rises to 2% for three years, only half next year's expected private sector increase, will increase inequality. To cut capital gains tax on buy-to-let property, antiques, paintings and jewellery is as shameless as it is dysfunctional.

Are Political journalists too close to their subject

I have written a couple of pieces about journalists relationships with the people that they cover and the theme continued last night when the political blogger Guido Fawkes appeared in a five minute piece on Newsnight last night.

He accused journalists such as Jeremy Paxman and Nick Robinson of timidity,of hiding behind the impartiality line and of not wanting to upset what he described as "cosy relationships with politicans"

Whereas bloggers such as himself can effectively go after politicans,it is something that you rarely see in commercial broadcasting.The reason why is that he doesnt have to do political interviews and can jeopodize his relationships with politicians.

He cites the example of Sky sending a junior reporter to interview David Cameron,when the newly elected Tory leader lost both his thread and temper.As a consequence,Sky lost access to the inner world of Tory politics for several weeks.

Journalists should break more stories than simply toeing the party line.

Nick Robinson who was interviewed for the piece is less than happy with its conclusions

"Attempting to engage with him in a grown up way I told "Guido" the truth. Namely, that in order for specialist journalists (whether health or legal or political reporters) to know their subject inside out they have to build working relationships with those they report on. Having worked at Panorama for some years, I know that it is sometimes easier for someone coming from outside to make the big "mother of a blow out" investigation without fear of burning their contacts. I went on to argue that this does not stop me asking the big and tough questions when they need asking.
Silly me. "Guido" uses my interview to argue that I don't "need to be so craven" and that "I should worry less about my relationship with politicians and more about my relations with viewers".

Guido's response

"Nick Robinson regrets speaking to Guido, well that may be, he probably won't give Guido an interview again. Bovvered.Maybe he thinks Guido should "pull his punches"?