Blurred Keys

So, we were right, the Irish "culture, media news, gossip - and whatever you’re having yourself" blog, Blogorrah.com, is trying to copy Gawker.com (ok, so it wouldn’t take a intellect to guess such).

More importantly, they’re trying to copy Gawker Media, reports the Sunday Times (vie Blogorrah.com). From VIP magazine to dog mag publisher, John Ryan, told the Times “The beauty of it is that there are very few overheads”.

And we do mean copy, well in the inspired way, the design is more then just similar to Gawker.com. The design is copied; the method of news aggregation with witty comments is copied.

Even thought they take the piss with them, Blogorrah.com is obsessed with photo call shots of Irish models in and around St Stephen’s Green, and then there are ‘celebrity’ and socialite photographs. Now where did they copy that from? A bit of Gawker, a bit of Defamer, or just VIP magazine?

We’ll keep reading and viewing, if only there was more reading then viewing to do. Just go easy on McDowell, he’s a bit stressed out at the moment.

The Irish Times are shortly leaving their landmark
building at D’Olier Street (and, err… Fleet St). They’re just moving down the road, and are apparently bringing
the real landmark, the Irish Times sign with clock, with them. The newspaper
today reported the current HQ has sold at around 30 million euro. Liam
Kavanagh, deputy md “expressed satisfaction at the price achieved”.

It’s a perfect time to start bloging, even temporally just to document the move. Maybe with a little podcasting and
video casting? Certainly with a lot of photo bloging. Image from Ireland.com

After we posted the bit about the Irish media and websites, we came across Adam Maguire’s blog post in the same vain, talk of the Irish media’s lacking websites isn’t surprising with a lot of chatter coming from the UK at the moment…

Guardian Unlimited have picked up a US editor, the same outlet is to file more stories on the web first, the Telegraph also ties the old and new closer, that newspaper says they make money online, and in the US news comes that newspaper website visitors ‘are more likely to make online purchases’,

On the podcast front, Guardian Unlimited, the Telegraph, Times Online, and even the Sun offers podcasts.

The news that BBC news editors’ blogs have gone public is been used by Damien Mulley to ask when will it happen in Ireland with newspapers, and who will be first. (Also, which newspaper will be the first to podcast?)

A comment from ‘Fergal’ states, “It certainly won’t be the times. Madam doesn’t really get the whole internets thing”. We were thinking it wouldn’t be the Irish Times, rather for their conservativeness and lack of any real transparency at the moment.

However, in all fairness, the IT has the best website out of all the Irish newspapers; it’s just a pity about the subscription model they use. The IT must know it’s a barrier, otherwise why do they have so many ‘free access’ pages – including ‘the Ticket’ weekly?

Comparing the IT’s site with the largest and most visited UK newspaper site, that is Guardian Unlimited, and you’ll find some other strange things. The Guardian and most UK papers use their sites as a promotion or extension of their brands, the IT hides under the Ireland.com banner while distancing it self from its classified listings with nicemove.ie.

The only apparent forum for IT readers to express their views (besides email) looks to be the business poll, the results of which appear in the paper once a week. It’s the same with the other Irish papers. Blurred Keys remembers Thomas Crosbie Media having forums hidden away, we can’t find them now.

Going back to the subject at hand and it is hard to figure out which newspaper in Ireland will blog first. Irish tech journalists are already apparently independently bloging with links mention at the end of printed articles and columns, however, that’s about the extent of it so far. It couldn’t help things that Ireland’s broadband penetration isn’t huge, and uptake is still relatively slow and sometimes hindered. Therefore, a medium to long-term view must be taken.

However unlikely, the Guardian online success as the UK most popular newspaper website shows that it is possible for a circulation underdog to succeed online. For this to happen the site must be more then an archive like most Irish newspaper sites currently are – blogs should be a large part to this.

If that success was possible to reproduce, the Irish Examiner could excel here and at the same time show a wider audience it’s no longer the Cork Examiner, the separation of breakingnews.ie may be somewhat misguided and a missed opportunity to properly build the Examiner as the national brand for the TCH group. The Indo group makes some of the same mistakes, building one large archive site for all newspaper maybe cheaper, but it doesn’t allow for much room to expand web content such as blogs and podcasts.

Ending on a positive note, Emily Bell, editor-in-chief of Guardian Unlimited wrote early this year that the site “will break even for the first time this financial year, largely on pursuing a model of advertising revenue - something that only as recently as three years ago many industry pundits thought would be impossible”. 

We may have avoided answering the question.

Apparently it’s already time to forget Vodafone’s
3G TV service, as RTE are testing a digital transmission method of getting
their TV stations to (a limited selection of) mobile phones. Yourtechstuff.com reports,
“I got my hands on one of the HTC handsets the week before last and the
reception and quality of the broadcast is excellent”.

Ireland’s answer to Gawker.com, BlogOrrah.com, is told by a reader “don’t try to be Private Eye or Phoenix lads” – since April they’re ran four stories in the vain of “Still Not Dead Yet”.

In Fact, Ah talks of the nature of the following reaction "There will be much heated debate but most people will eventually settle in the ‘love him’ or ‘hate him’ camp, for there are no half-way houses where Haughey is concerned". But one of their readings wasn’t so in touch
with reaction - “You cannot help feeling, however, that there are a lot of people
sharpening knives in readiness for a veritable bloodbath that will happen after
Haughey’s body has been laid to rest”. Most never waited.

Read the rest of this entry »

According to the Irish Times, Kushnir – the sole survivor of the car crash in which the infamous Irish politician Liam Lawlor died – is suing the Observer, the Sunday Independent, the Sunday Tribune, the Sunday World, the Irish Sunday Mirror, and the Irish Independent, over wrongfully reporting that she was a teenage prostitute.

Ms Kushnir is proceeding with her case notwithstanding the fact that all the newspapers cited have either apologised or offered to do so for their coverage…

The Sunday Independent, using information provided by the Observer’s correspondent in Moscow, wrongly suggested that Mr Lawlor was in the company of a teenage prostitute when he died. The story was "lifted" by other newspapers.

The Sunday Tribune was said to have only added the claim in the late print edition.

The teenage prostitute claim was vie an Observer reporter in Moscow apparently from a police source. The Guardian Media Group’s Sunday newspaper, the Observer, held tight, reacting slower then other newspapers leaving their online edition unchanged until sometime on Tuesday of that week.

By Wednesday the Observer had issued a correction and apology –

Serious discrepancies have emerged in the account provided by police in Moscow to The Observer of the events surrounding the death of Liam Lawlor last Saturday. In the light of these discrepancies we have removed the story published in the Irish edition of The Observer from our website. We would like to apologise for the inaccuracies in the story and for the distress the story caused

On Monday, while not as direct as the Observer article, the Guardian published a story stating that -

Lawlor, 60, was killed instantly when the Mercedes he was travelling in crashed into a bollard in a red-light district. The driver was also killed and a 19-year-old Ukrainian woman travelling with Lawlor was seriously injured. Police said she had no papers. A spokesman for Moscow police said it appeared the girl had not known Lawlor long"

The Irish media had reported she was 32-years-old by this time. The story is now apprently offline.  

In the Sunday Tribune, RTE tries to defend the vicious "personalities" circle. ‘We push our own because there’s no competition . . . RTE’ marks the second week in a row of the Tribune attacking RTE ‘pushing their own’.

"I don’t think it’s a conspiracy. It’s about getting people who are well-known,” says Peter Feeney, of RTE.

INN political correspondent, Ken Murray has other ideas "In INN’s case, we impact on two million listeners every day. Our people are in the front seat when something big happens in this country,” adding “I can get on CNN quicker than I can get on RTE”. But according to the Tribune, no INN staffer has ever appeared as a guest on an RTE current affairs programme.

Columns over, in another article in the newspaper – ‘Nation pits its wits against RTE ‘celebrities’’ –  Feeney digs a hole "You can argue if you like that it is incestuous, or that it is RTE promoting itself, but these are celebrities and celebrities tend to appear on television".

On reflection of the topics that are being
posted here, I’ve decided to redefine Blurred Keys as a ‘media blog’. To be frank, there
are few posts here that could be classed as personal (a ‘personal blog’ being
Blurred Keys’ last sub-moniker).

The vast majority of content was on the
topic of media – whether it was newspapers or the internet etc. Until now, none
of this was planned, just what I wanted to post about. For the moment, at least, the more personal content
(mainly photographs) will stay here, but new posts in the same vain won’t be
posted.

The tone this blog uses will – of course –
most likely change to a more formal format. The name, while not all inclusive
of all media formats that will be posted about, will remain the same.

Any thoughts welcome – particularly from friends
who, in the past, instead of using the comments system actually used the old fashion
talking method of communication.